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Software Folklore – A collection of weird bug stories
a blog post by @azwinkau
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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Was there PTSD in the ancient or medieval world?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020216 points205 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
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The Making of Stunt Island
It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…
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Working from home on the //c+
In honor of Apple's 44th birthday today, I decided to set up my //c+ as a terminal using my homebuilt wifi modem. Getting modem.mgr...
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Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you’ve never heard of (2014)
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
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Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
"Demoskene is an international community focused on demos, programming, graphics and sound creatively real-time audiovisual performances. [..] Subculture is an empowering and important part of identity for its members."
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Emacs: The most successful malleable system
Emacs is probably the most successful malleable system in the history of computing. What can we learn from it for designing the malleable systems of the future?
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British Rail’s short experiment with travelling pubs
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
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Remembering Conway
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
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PC-XT Emulator on a ESP8266 (2018)
Can you run a 8086 PC-XT emulation with 640K RAM, 80×25 CGA composite video and a 1.44MB MS-DOS disk on a ESP12E without additional components? Yes, you can and I did. The CPU emulator is a po…
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Google Wave’s failure is a lesson for modern real-time collaboration tools
Google Wave debuted at I/O in May 2009 and shut down in April 2012. What happened, why it failed, and how its real-time engine still powers editors.
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A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained
In the Apollo Moon missions, the Saturn V rocket was guided by an advanced onboard computer system built by IBM. This system was built fro...
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In Depth: The Game Boy Printer
Diving deep into how this Game Boy accessory really works
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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The most expensive typefaces (2019)
The most expensive typeface I encountered is JHA Bodoni Ritalic, at €4,401.99 (almost $5,000) for a single font.
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The Web is the Next Platform (1995)
I started working full-time on what became Internet Explorer 1.0 in early October, 1994, grew the engineering team to 67 individuals by the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August, 1996, and got very litt…
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Philip Anderson 1923-2020
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of…
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Smalltalk-87
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
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Compaq and Coronavirus
Compaq’s descent from a company of action to a brand is a frightening parable for the the West’s focus on talk over action.
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The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014)
Following a poorly-timed Johnny Carson joke in 1973, millions of Americans hoarded every toilet paper roll on the market and induced a mass hysteria.
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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Your First THINK C Program
Welcome, child! Come in, come in! I have so few visitors to this little hut. Pull up a chair, and I’ll put on some tea.
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Remembering the LAN
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent's medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address…
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Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...