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How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 182 posts.
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The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, by Ants
What does the Internet have in common with an ant colony? More than you might think.
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Code Page 437 Refuses to Die
I am updating volume 2 of Core Java and got stuck on the section on text files in the internationalization chapter. How hard can this be in 2016? Surely everyone uses UTF-8 these days. Or do they? Make a file Test.java
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Book Review: Albion’s Seed
I. Albion’s Seed by David Fischer is a history professor’s nine-hundred-page treatise on patterns of early immigration to the Eastern United States. It’s not light reading and not…
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The void left by the parallel port
Resurrecting a dead interface
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‘Lost’ songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life
An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1,000 years this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music
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The Secrets of Medieval Fonts
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering tha…
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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The Heart of Deterrence (2012)
Nuclear strategy is one part cold logic, one part emotional terror.
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Born for it – How the image of software developers came about
Where did the common image of the socially-awkward, white, male programmer come from?
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Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro
I was part of the first ever group of foreigners given access to all stations across both lines of the Pyongyang Metro. Here's my experience!
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Inuit Cartography: Wooden Coastline Maps That Fit in a Mitten
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried…
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The Road to Ultima V
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
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The Man Who Knew Infinity
Last night I went to see a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of the new movie about Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. It was extremely good, infinitely better than the most recent high profi…
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1995 Programming on the Sega Saturn
This is a document I wrote in 1995, while working on Neversoft’s first game: Skeleton Warriors. It was the first game I’d worked on where I did not use 68K Assembly.
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How old were the inventors of major inventions?
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
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When Lobbying was Illegal
Although lobbyists' influence seems inevitable, in the 1800s, several states banned lobbying outright.
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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
The technology industry is still young, but its history is already rich with myths and legends.
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David J.C. MacKay, Machine Learning pioneer, dies
Thank you so much to lots of lovely friends who have offered to visit me in hospital! Ramesh and I are wanting to keep life really simple...
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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Debian 8.4 released
[03 Oct 2016] Several donations boost reliability of Debian's core infrastructure [27 Sep 2016] The Debian Project mourns the loss of Kristoffer H. Rose [17 Sep 2016] Updated Debian 8: 8.6 released [09 Jul 2016] DebConf16 closes in Cape Town and DebConf17 dates announced [02 Jul 2016] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Jessie …
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Apple II DOS source code
Unlike the Apple I, the Apple II was fully assembled and ready to use with any display monitor. The version with 4K of memory cost $1298. It had color, graphics, sound, expansion slots, game paddles, and a built-in BASIC programming language.
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American Big Brother: A Century of Political Surveillance and Repression
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
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A Tribute to Andy Grove (2015) [video]
Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, came to the United States as a refugee from Hungary. With a relentless energy and exceptional mind, he helped build the iconic tech company Intel — and in the process, Silicon Valley itself. Ben Horowitz offers a tribute to this legendary leader (and his own inspiration)…
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The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early OO Programming
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING