The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk sys…
the history of 3dfx Interactive
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but just 1 year ago when I started working on C64 OS, I didn't have the first clue how the C64 Keyboard worked. I knew there was a thing called the keyboard buffer, but I had cloudy thoughts of it being inside the keyboard itself. When I had to actually write the keyboard scanning…
Philip K. Dick arrived in Canada on February 16th, 1972, as guest of honour for the 2nd Vancouver Science Fiction Convention ( VCON-2 ), an all-expenses-paid invitation, jointly sponsored by the science fiction societies of Simon Frazer University and the University of British Columbia. He was 43 years old, the author…
Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
British money has a lengthy history, so it's not surprising that it's evolved and changed over the years. Whether you're watching British TV, reading British
VT220 TrueType font
I’ve made some modern games in retro style, and one thing people will always tell you is, make sure your pixels are the same size. When your base resolution ...
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023105 points177 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Today marks the end of the first year of Putin’s War in Ukraine. I will not call it an anniversary, because I don’t think anyone is celebrating. Nevertheless I think this makes a useful…
Rich description of aspects of academic life from student through professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1900-01.
CHM releases to the public for the first time a full oral history with Ivan Sutherland, pioneer of computer graphics, virtual reality, asynchronous systems, and more.
An illustrated description of what Textmode Art is and how to get started.
So farewell then, Havant station’s 1930s railway toilets. It is doubtful whether many passengers will mourn their loss, but they are another piece of railway heritage that has slipped beyond …
A new look at da Vinci’s papers reveals his insightful attempts to probe the nature of gravity 500 years ago
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4, 3.6.5, and 3.6.6. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security . You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.7 as soon as possible.
The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…
The story of Sun Microsystems and the Java programming language
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170
More than raw factual errors, I’m interested in how science and scientists are depicted and how it influences peoples’ opinions of science as a process. You can’t see lasers and X…
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
Experience history's greatest journey along the veins of the world. Relive the interactive journey from Europe to China, explore the map of the Silk Roads, or choose an outpost to trave back in time to.
Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing …
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
An inquiry into how critics stumble
