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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,251 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Being a kid making games in the early 2000s
An autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen about being a youngster making games and posting them online!
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Charles Tandy, the mastermind behind Radio Shack
He was also involved in taking the Pier 1 chain nationwide
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Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal
Wait, that's not him.
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F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
From Pascal and ex tapes to a VAX system: Bill Joy handles BSD distribution and debugging, then joins Ozalp Babaoglu to bring virtual memory to Unix.
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Jules Verne's Lost Novel
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
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Infinite Mac: BeOS
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
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My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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MacOS Extensions Pack for the Apple Network Server v1.0
By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server , Apple's Unix-through-and-thro...
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The compiler was supposed to end programming too
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
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ZX Spectrum Next Laptop
Having created a laptop style case for my ZX Spectrum Next dev board previously, I wanted to re-visit the idea of a Spectrum laptop and address some of the issues faced in the previous version.
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William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
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What was a Token Ring network?
Token Ring and ARCNET once competed with Ethernet as networking standards
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Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
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Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran : High-performance parallel programming language
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The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
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Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
Archaeologists have uncovered a royal archive of cuneiform tablets in the ancient Hittite city of Samuha, modern-day Sivas, central Turkey. This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life…
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The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
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The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
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Knuth reward check
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.
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Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
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Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
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Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.