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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
962
The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
963
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine.
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Tax consequences of WIN95 team members keeping a piece of software for testing
It basically falls under the de minimis rule.
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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
967
The purge of German science in 1933
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
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I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals
As should be expected, a number of individuals have come forward with responses to the initial blog post. While I do not expect everyone to take even a passing interest in the rabbit-hole of the si…
969
There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
For over thirty years, a dead rabbit has hung inside Seven Sisters tube station, and thousands of people walk past it every day without noticing.
970
Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
DESCENT is a classic 3-D first-person shooter for DOS that was released in 1995, developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions. DESCENT is a contemporary of the other very popular FPS of the time, DOOM by id Software, released just over a year before. However, it is not based on DOOM; the…
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I am no longer attending vintage computer festivals
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing …
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Programming with DOS Debugger (2003)
MS-DOS as well as Windows 98 come with a debugger program named DEBUG.EXE that can be used to work with assembly language instructions and machine code. In MS-DOS version 6.22, this program is named DEBUG.EXE and it is typically present at C:\DOS\DEBUG.EXE . On Windows 98, this program is usually present at…
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A History of Source Control Systems: SCCS and RCS
dsp's personal site
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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
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Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps
A lot of computing got done even before we had stacks and heaps.
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The Hearts of the Super Nintendo
When I start studying a vintage system, the first thing I like to do is understand how its components work together at the hardware level [1] .
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Ross Anderson
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and Information Security. (Okay…
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Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
980
The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s concept computer that never shipped
In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company’s bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not…
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Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
983
New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
The recent announcement of the discovery of three new Aztec codices is covered here for the English-speaking public.
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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
985
Intel 8080 emulator. 19th IOCCC. Best of Show
An Intel 8080 processor emulator written in less than 4K of C language and able to run CP/M. It won the Best of Show category (first place) of the 19th IOCCC. The 8080 originated the Zilog Z80 and started the personal computer's revolution.
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party
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We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
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IBM 360’s are searching for a new home
Hello! If you’re still here reading this blog, I’m impressed. We haven’t posted anything of note for some years now and frankly, thats because we haven’t done anything of note with the project. The machines have been sitting in their home, virtually untouched, for 4 years now. Chris & I (Adam) are just too busy with…