The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
At a sad time at which the world has just lost Steve Jobs, it is well to reflect on some of the things which he, his passion, and his creations have given us, as now the technical community should take...
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
In the 1980s, the financial sector suffered through a period of distress that was focused on the nation's savings and loan industry.
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
So who does?
“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many…
When a Southern Airways DC-9 loses both engines during a storm, an attempt to land it on a rural highway goes horribly wrong.
David Patterson and team at UC Berkeley give RISC its name and make the first RISC microprocessor design.
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
Published: 09-04-2023 23:59 | Last update: 11-04-2023 22:29 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...
Building scientific instruments from the past, along with other technical projects.
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016) explored AI and art for nearly 50 years before we saw the rising popularity of these new machine learning tools. In those five decades, Cohen worked on a single program called Aaron that involved teaching a robot to create drawings. Aaron’s education took a similar pa
Making glulam of the tree of knowledge.
It’s 1986 and you’ve got a 31 tons of copper, in the form of a giant 46 meter tall statue, that’s looking a bit worse for wear.
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978. This processor ended up being hugely influential, setting the path for the x86 architec...
Uli’s blog on programming, game development, pop culture and other boring things.
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
