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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 216 posts.
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Papers from the Lost Culture of Array Languages (2011)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Eighteenth Century English mail hacks (2001)
(((It's very clear that the postal system is not a dead medium. However, the physical and economic structure of the posts has undergone profound, elaborate changes over the centuries. Early postal systems often doubled as espionage networks, and were often proverbially corrupt.
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Evolution of the English Alphabet
Buy the poster | Watch a video explanation
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Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change
Nikon losing the leadership position to Canon in the market for professional photography 30 year technology transition story.
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Quote Origin: It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It
Upton Sinclair? H. L. Mencken? William Jennings Bryan? C. E. M. Joad? Christopher Matthews? Paul Krugman? Anonymous?
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A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64
Move over, Sennheiser. Make yourself scarce, Bose. Here comes the ultimate Hi-Fi solution for your living room: The Commodore 64! I s it sa...
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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Blender’s Prehistory – Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991)
The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. Writing it was possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.
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Intel’s Chipped Chips
Typically when collecting something, be it coins, cars or CPU’s having the most pristine unblemished example is highly desirable. However, sometimes, the best example is one that isn’t perfect, in coin collecting it may be a rare double struck coin, or some other flaw that actually makes the coin more valuable.
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Hennessy and Patterson win Turing Award
Hennessy and Patterson pioneered a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures that has had enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Their reduced instruction set computer (RISC) approach has led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects…
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Twenty years, 1998 – 2018
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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“No Man’s Sky” Displayed on the Amiga 1000
It should be evident to anyone viewing this website that I have a bit of a vintage computer obsession. And regular readers who’ve been paying attention over the past year and a half or so likely know that my other … Continue reading →
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Kottke.org is 20 years old today
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
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The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign
The main feature is fast access to a flat, 24-bit address space. Although there are many ways to retrofit a 'C02 with expanded memory, AFAIK none can touch this implementation for speed. Given any random address in the 16 megabyte space, KK can fetch that byte in 6-8 cyles. It's fast because:
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Debian 9.4 released
[10 Nov 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.6 released [05 Aug 2018] DebConf18 closes in Hsinchu and DebConf19 dates announced [14 Jul 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.5 released [23 Jun 2018] Updated Debian 8: 8.11 released [01 Jun 2018] Debian 7 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [10 Mar 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.4 released
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Nixie-clock using neon lamps as logic (2017)
The above shows my home-built digital clock. It uses Nixie-tubes for readout. In contrast to most other nixie-clocks being built these days, my clock does not use any transistor or IC for driving the tubes. Instead, the driving logic is built from neon lamps , together with resistors, capacitors and silicon diodes.