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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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The Beginnings of FM Radio Broadcasting (2018)
The beginnings of FM radio broadcasting in the USA
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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
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PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok
This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods. You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard System...
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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The origins of the steam engine (2023)
An essay with interactive animated diagrams
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They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket
What’s the real reason that cellphone manufacturers stopped fitting this simple, robust connector?
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Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
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Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail
Powell's is rightly famed as a destination for book lovers, and I finally made my pilgrimage last weekend. The perils of air travel limited the inevitable splurge -- I had to fit my haul into a single backpack -- but I wound up with some nifty ...
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How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Challenging the conventional narrative on Intel's smartphone miss
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Eating the Birds of America: Audubon's Culinary Reviews of America's Birds
On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to…
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Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports , I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
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How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
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The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
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The Dying Computer Museum
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
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Archiving "The Famous Computer Cafe"
A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all. The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer…
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When Serial Isn't RS-232, Geocaching with the Garmin GPS 95
Connecting a Garmin GPS 95 to a Flipper Zero, the serial adventures along the way, and finding the Netherland's first Geocache.
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Getting back into C programming for CP/M
This article is about how programming for CP/M, usng a 40-year-old C compiler, differs from modern C development, even for console applications.
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The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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Abel, the Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein
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Yesterday's Pixels, Today
In August I finished work on a game called Restricted Airspace for the Wonderbundle, a bundle of new games by NYC game designers available as a reward to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter . It is a 3rd person aerial shooter in the style of the original Star Fox set in a city modeled on Beirut in the 1890s. It was…
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The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
I praise his work as a composer—but also as plumber, taxi driver, steel mill worker, and in other trades
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0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE (2003)
Tuesday, January 28, 2003 0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE Recently, the origin of the magic numbers of 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE came up in an email conversation between a number of ex-NeXT folks. Specifically, someone asked what the origin of the two magic numbers were in the context of mach-o file formats and why had Java…
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Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app
The latest version of this app is now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.More info on my apps website at: gingerbeardman.com/apps/stapler/
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The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
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Moments in Chromecast's history
Take a look back at Chromecast’s history over the past 11 years — and learn about the future of streaming TV with Google.
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Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art