The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
Why Lisp Failed.
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum , a mathematical physicist whose groundbreaking work on deterministic chaos influenced fields ranging from cardiology to cartography, died in New York City on June 30 at the age of 74. Feigenbaum was the Toyota Professor and director of the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at…
Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the f...
Two Stanford historians discuss how the United States’ Declaration of Independence became one of the pillars of American civic life and other lesser-known historical facts about what happened on July 4, 1776.
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell my chickens…
I've had my head down, programming away on C64 OS, and been making some great progress. I've tweeted a few things out, some of which are revealing of things I've either never talked about here or even seem to contradict what I've said here. So I'd like to take a breather and talk about some of these developments.
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
The other day, being unable to find a suitable open-source text editor for cpmish , I sat down and wrote a simple vi-like editor. It took nine hours. I have it all on video.
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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Turbinia - An Uninvited Guest
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
I was thinking recently that here in the West we take our video game history largely for granted. Look back at the Golden Age of video games, and it’s apparent that we had it pretty good R…
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
During World War II, STEINWAY AND SONS produced specially-built pianos for the American troops. Called the Victory Vertical or G.I. Steinways, the pianos were sometimes airdropped onto battlefields to provide a bit of relaxation...
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
