The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 202 posts.
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
Many reverse-engineered versions of “KERNAL”, the C64’s ROM operating system exist, and some of them even in a form that can be built into the original binary. But how about building the original C64 KERNAL source with the original tools?
On the thirty-first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history, over one hundred people from the former Soviet Union shared their …
This article has previously been published in Norwegian in Aftenposten Historie no. 6, 2015 and Biolog no, 1, 2014. Due to several reques...
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
A map of the roads of ancient Rome, in the style of a transit diagram.
Discover the evolution of UUIDs. Explore cloud communication trends, customer stories, and tips for scalable apps with Twilio's APIs. Learn more now!
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
Over the past year or so, I’ve been loading up SyncTerm and logging in to various telnet-accessible BBSs here and there — nothing too consistent. But, thanks to a piece of kit released by Paul Rickards, over the past month … Continue reading →
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…
Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. A very odd essay from a 1922 issue of The American Magazine that seems to go against the general grain of most of the articles…
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
If you read the news , you may think the MP3 file format was recently officially “killed” somehow, and any remaining MP3 holdouts should all move to AAC now. These are all simple rewrites of Fraunhofer IIS’ announcement that they’re terminating the MP3 patent-licensing program.
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
Updated May 10, 2021: Hey there friend! This ever-green blog is gold – just like reaktorians. If you’re reading this, you might be one of us. The30th
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
Twenty tips addressing the basics of ballroom etiquette for single Victorian gentlemen.
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. "At home found all well," he wrote in his diary, "but the m...
In the bird’s-eye view, one might have the comforting illusion that country borders are also language borders. Especially where the bor...
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
