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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Leaving Arizona – the Story of the Motorola 6800 part 2 and creation of the 6502
Part 2 of The Story of the Motorola 6800
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Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
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The $500M Dollar Typo
It's amazing how a series of small but unfortunate events can quickly add up to one very expensive problem. Like the time one person fat-fingered the wrong year on a mainframe JCL job, Ronald Reagan died, and the US postal service lost $500 million.
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John Michell: Country Parson Described Black Holes in 1783 (2000)
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
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Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
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Glucoboy
Emulating the unknown: Blood testing device for the GBA
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Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
This is, so far, the only article of mine that's been completely deleted from Wikipedia. I've salvaged a copy of it from Search.com , since it's gone from the site's history now, and am putting it here until I decide what else to do with it. Non-PC compatible x86 computers For much of the time that…
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Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
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AI or Ain't: Eliza
Explore the intriguing history of Eliza, a pioneering chatbot, and learn how to implement a basic version in Go, unraveling the roots of conversational AI.
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A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
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Ultima (2012)
When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth , a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as…
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Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
Geek For Life
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The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
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30cm worm fossil more than half a billion years old discovered in Greenland
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…
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Thomas Cochrane
in lowercase bullet points
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Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
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Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
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2024's public domain is a banger
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
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Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
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IDEs we had 30 years ago
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
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BASIC was not just a programming language
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.