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IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks
Resurrecting Days of Thunder from dying floppy disks took tenacity...and a little bit of luck.
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020260 points40 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
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Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
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Die analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
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ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
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1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
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Examining Windows 1.0 Hello.c
For those who’ve been long-time readers of SoylentNews, it’s not exactly a secret that I have a personal interest in retro computing and documenting the history and evolution of the Personal Computer. About three years ago, I ran a series of articles about restoring Xenix 2.2.3c, and I’m far overdue on writing a new…
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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!
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Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text
New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text. The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated…
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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Roman Finger Counting
I recently wrote a final paper on the history of written numerals. In the process, I discovered this fascinating tidbit that didn’t really fit in my paper, but I wanted to put it somewhere. So I’m writing about it here.
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My New Old Apple IIe Computer
How I found a vintage Apple IIe computer on the sidewalk and brought it back to life
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Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online
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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John Peel Sessions
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
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Racket is 25
posted by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt The First Thoughts [Matthias]: Wednesday 25 January 1995: POPL used to be a Monday-through-Wednesday-noon affair. Cormac Flanagan presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate i...
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Cloning a 6502 Apple-1 in just 930 logic gates
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
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Debian 10.4
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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Tiny transformer inside: Decapping an isolated power transfer chip
I saw an ad for a tiny chip 1 that provides 5 volts 2 of isolated power: You feed 5 volts in one side, and get 5 volts out the other si...
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A Map of the Trees of London
Ever wondered what that tree is you passed during your lockdown exercise walk? There's a website that tells you the answer.
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Systemd, ten years later: a historical and technical retrospective
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
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Reverse-engineering the audio chip in the Nintendo Game Boy Color
The Nintendo Game Boy Color is a handheld game console that was released in 1998. It uses an audio amplifier chip to drive the internal s...
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British Museum makes 1.9M images available for free
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.