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The Transistor, Part 3: Endless Reinvention
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 216 posts.
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Anecdote Origin: Knowing Where To Tap
A Fired Machinist? Charles R. Wiers? Hubert N. Alyea? Charles Proteus Steinmetz? Henry Ford? Anonymous?
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The Land Before Binary
In the early days of computing, 1 + 1 didn’t always equal 10
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Building the Commodore computer that should have existed
Last month, the 100,000th hardware engineer registered on SnapEDA, so I thought it would be fun to reach out to learn more about what they were working on. Little did I know that it would turn out to be so epic!
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The Incredible Machine
As we saw in my previous article , Jeff Tunnell walked away from Dynamix’s experiments with “interactive movies” feeling rather disillusioned by the whole concept. How ironic, then, that in at least one sense comparisons with Hollywood continued to ring true even after he thought he’d consigned such things to his…
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The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC
SOLVED: The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC. For a hair over twenty years, I have been chasing the markings on the ...
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Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
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A vacuum tube ROM?
Is such a thing possible? Turns out it is, and it’s called a Monoscope. I recently got a Raytheon CK1414 Monoscope with a good getter and a working filament–naturally, I decided to fire…
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Quote Origin: History Does Not Repeat Itself, But It Rhymes
Question for Quote Investigator: There is a popular humorous maxim about history that is usually attributed to Mark Twain. But there is so much uncertainty about this ascription that a top business columnist for the “New York Times” wrote the following: 1
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‘We Got to Be Cool About This‘: An Oral History of the LØpht, Part 1
Independent security journalism: news and analysis on intrusions, vulnerabilities, AI, policy and the software supply chain, plus video and podcasts.
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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The Eudora Email Client Source Code
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
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History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
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Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
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Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
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The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story
Ault and Wiborg’s art nouveau poster ads.
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The Construction of a Yurt (1995)
[ed note: this article is also available in pdf and postscript and as a Microsoft Word document . ]
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Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine
**Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine** At the height of the Cold War NATO submariners found themselves confronting a Soviet submarine which not only greatly out-performed their own boats, but which could operate beyond the reach of their weapons… Read More >….
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The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
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The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
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So Long Last /8 and Thanks For All the Allocations
On 17 April 2018, we allocated the last available block of 1,024 addresses in 185/8 - the last /8 we received from IANA back in 2011. This article looks at how this address space was allocated and how it is used today. It's important to keep in mind that while 185/8 is finished, we still have aroun…