The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
I found this keyboard on eBay recently, although it wasn’t quite the one I was looking for I still think it is interesting. Let me show you why. This is the keyboard, and you would be forgiven for…
SVG Phone Home
Having grown up in the 2000s, I love discovering that things I presumed were banal back then were, in fact, part of a bigger story.
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking…
tl;dr: Infinite Mac has a new home at infinitemac.org . Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4 . The project is also now accepting donations (via GitHub Sponsors or PayPal ).
To help us celebrate three decades of open source innovation, State of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper declared March 26, 2023, as Red Hat Day across North Carolina.
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
We had no idea how close we came to being crushed.
Counterfeits CPU were very common in the mid-90s. The worst period was between 1993 (just after the launch of the Intel 486 DX2) and 1998 (when the Pentium II started to be multiplier-locked). It was extremely easy for tricksters to remove the original marking and reprint another one with a higher f
One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK, 1 which used a rotating globe to indicate...
Moore, who set the course for the future of the semiconductor industry, devoted his later years to philanthropy.
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
We will be exploring the history of fears about technological unemployment.
The A.M. Turing Award, ACM's most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall s
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
While programmers today take multiplication for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — multiplication r...
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I de
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
I'm in the middle of turning two badly treated IBM ThinkPad 701CS machines (the ones with the lovely unfolding keyboard) into a single, wor...
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
curl turns 25 years old and what better way to celebrate this than to join fellow curl friends, developers and fans online on the exact birthday? At 17:00 UTC March 20, 2023. We run an Online birthday party open for everyone to join. Consider muting yourself when you join, but feel encouraged to leave the … Continue…
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
In the Soyuz space missions, cosmonauts tracked their position above the Earth with a remarkable electromechanical device with a rotating ...
