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Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor
The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hund...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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My story on “worse is better” (2018)
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
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Unix command line conventions over time
ETA, 2022-05-19: I'm happy this blog post has gathered a fair bit of interest. However, this post is as much effort as I'm prepared to put into the topic. I think it would be a good idea to write an essay, article, or even a book, on how syntax of the Unix command line has varied over the years, and in different…
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022194 points208 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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Japanese Words in Neuromancer
This is a reblog/translation of a post by Héctor García… During the 80s in the United States, Japan was started to be seen as the inevitable first economic power of the world. It went from be…
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How Crossrail was affected by the curvature of the Earth (2018)
Crossrail's tunnels under London are long, so long that when they were being planned, they were affected by something you might not expect -- the curvature of the earth.
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Lisp in Space
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
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The PalmOS powered wristwatch from Fossil
Imagine a smartwatch you could load any PalmOS app you wanted onto. We had that... about 20 years ago.
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Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios
On this page of Talmud we read of a very bizarre case: יבמות נד, א אָמַר רַבָּה: נָפַל מִן הַגָּג וְנִתְקַע — חַיָּיב בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרִים, וּבִיבִמְתּוֹ לֹא קָנָה. בְּנֵזֶק, בְּצַעַר, בְּשֶׁבֶת, בְּרִפּוּי. אֲבָל בּוֹשֶׁת לָא מִיחַיַּיב, דְּאָמַר מָר: אֵין חַיָּיב עַל הַבּוֹשֶׁת עַד
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Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
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Everyone should learn the slide rule (2021)
The obsolescence of the slide rule is mostly un-mourned, but as with many technological obsolescences, we have lost something valuable with its demise. The type of thinking which goes along with us…
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The Applesoft Compiler (TASC): We have the source code, in a sense
The desperation of programming under tight memory constraints.
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Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)
I was just alerted to this story by one of the followers of this blog… Last month Voyager 2 began returning some unusual signals. This story is being reported by alternate news outlets as s…
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The digital ranging system that measured the distance to the Apollo spacecraft
During the Apollo missions to the Moon, a critical task for NASA was determining the spacecraft's position. To accomplish this, they devel...
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Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum celebrates its 40 years anniversary today. Read more about how the community is still active - creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware.
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Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
Webreturn web design & development, Scotland2022266 points216 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
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The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers”
Akron and Macon were flying aircraft carriers designed for long-range scouting. Both crashed at sea, ending the U.S. Navy's rigid airship program.
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The Birth of Tcl
Tap, Click, Launch
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A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge
There are thousands of books in print today about starting a business, but only a handful about ending one and moving on . Tamburri2020 is a deep dive into one particular (and not yet complete) ending: the decline of SourceForge , which was the first (and for many years the largest) open source software forge. Over…
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The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004)
So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.
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The x86 architecture is the weirdo, part 2
It does everything differently, because of course it does.
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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo...
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The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingl…
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File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink
Fun with LapLink 5 and parallel port file transfers under FreeDOS
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The Apple-1's shift-register memory
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced exactly 46 years ago, on April 11, 1976. This early microcomputer used an unus...