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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 202 posts.
Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
Were Early Modern People Perpetually Drunk? (2016)
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ACLU History
In the years following World War I, America was gripped by the fear that the Communist Revolution that had taken place in Russia would spread to the United States. As is often the case when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties paid the price. In November 1919 and January 1920, in what notoriously became…
IBM Punched Card Typography
C ard punches of various types, models and makes featured an option to print the characters encoded by the holes punched in any of the columns in human readable form onto the top of the card. While it is well known that these characters were printed by a 5 × 7 dot matrix, comprehensive information on what these…
The Craft of Text Editing (1999)
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
Stratus: Servers that won’t quit – The 24 year running computer
Making the rounds this week is the Computer World story of a Stratus Tech. computer at a parts manufacturer in Michigan. This computer has not had an unscheduled outage in 24-years, which seems rather impressive. Originally installed in 1993 it has served well. In 2010 it was awarded for being the longest serving…
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
Hardcore History 59 The Destroyer of Worlds
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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
The practice of programming, 18 years later
Over the new year holiday time I had a chance to get away from it all, and snuck up to Finland to sit in a lodge on the Gulf of Finland, sip coffee, take saunas and read. I brought along a few books, the only programming one being Brian W …
Debian 8.7 released
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
Compiling a Mac OS 8 Application on MacOS Sierra
A light hearted look back at my time programming in the 1990s as I try to get an old Minesweeper implementation of mine from 1999, written in C++ using PowerPlant for Mac OS 8, compiling in Xcode 8 and running on macOS Sierra.
Disassembling Jak and Daxter
I don't work at Naughty Dog, and I don't have any secret knowledge of Jak & Daxter, except what I figured out myself from the disc. So a lot of this may well be wrong. Take a pinch of salt with it.
Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
Inside the 74181 ALU chip
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
Rumors of Cmd’s death have been greatly exaggerated
This post is in response to a story published on December 6th 2016 by ComputerWorld titled "Say goodbye to the MS-DOS command prompt" and its follow-up
Minstrel ZX80 Clone
Here is a new ZX80 clone that I have called the Minstrel. It is a fairly accurate clone electrically to the ZX80, using the same chips and ...
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2017? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1960 The books To Kill a Mockingbird and Rabbit, Run, the films The Magnificent Seven and The Time Machine, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s…