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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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DOS on Dope (2010)
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
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Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022121 points49 commentscited by 15History & Retro Computing details
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
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Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years
Are you tired of heavy web pages, browser pop-ups, flashing banners, N-factor authentication, user tracking and analytics? Well, there are…
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Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue
Why we need to revisit the origin of blue hyperlink While musing over my recently published article, Why are hyperlinks blue, I was left feeling a bit blue
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Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)
Data-driven approach to history
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
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Why “process substitution” is a late feature in Unix shells
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…
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Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it…
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Commodore 900: Unix-like workstation/server that was eclipsed by Amiga (2020)
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
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Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
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Filling in some gaps in the story of Space Cadet Pinball on 64-bit Windows
The story as I experienced it.
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Programming in 1987 versus Today
Many developers today have no idea what programming was like in the 80s.
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Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever – except she was a fraud
If you think that people who deliberately engage in dubious scientific practices like plagiarism, falsification of results, or attendance at fake conferences represent the worst of scientific misconduct—then you have clearly never heard of Elena Ceausescu.
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Ultra High Resolution Photo of Night Watch (2022)
Op 8 juli 2019 start het Rijksmuseum Operatie Nachtwacht, het grootste en meest veelzijdige onderzoeks- en restauratieproject van Rembrandts meesterwerk in de geschiedenis. Operatie Nachtwacht heeft tot doel het schilderij optimaal te behouden voor de toekomst.
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Secret Military Telephone Buttons
It's the first of the new year, which means we ought to do something momentous to mark the occasion, like a short piece about telephones. Why so much on telephones lately? I think I'm just a little burned out on software at the moment and I need a vacation before I'm excited to write about failed Microsoft ventures…
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50 Years of Text Games: The End of a Journey
Some final thoughts on this epic expedition.
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How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
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Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
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Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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Playable English Localizations of Slovak Digital Games from the Late 80s Period
English translations of early Slovak digital games from the late 80s period, created in cooperation with Slovak Game Developers Association by Stanislav Hrda, Slavomír Labský, Marián Kabát, Darren Chastney, Jakub Celušák and Maroš Brojo. Download gamesENG versions of all games Accompanying contentGuides for all…
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Satoshi leaked his Los Angeles IP address (2016)
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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Heroes of Might and Magic
The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy…
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...