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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
By Nick Szabo, 2002
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Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)
An MIT urban planner looks at the alternative vision for a Berlin that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built.
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PC DOS Reimagined
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
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Lode Runner
It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented…
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Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
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The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space
Many CPUs have been used in space craft, space stations and other such probes. Such CPUs must be highly reliable, and very durable. The temperatures in space, even with heaters, can vary widely. The radiation that a system is exposed too can be immense. So when designing one of these systems designers don't always use…
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The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
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January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all
By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all! On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These […]
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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd
Introduction I've been on a bit of a floppy disc protection odyssey recently. This will probably be the last floppy disc related post for so...
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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Where Did Combinators Come From? Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel
A dive into the unknown personal and academic history of the mathematician who developed combinators, Moses Schönfinkel.
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Debian 10.7 Released
[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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That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020121 points103 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018)
When I was young I owned a PlayStation 1 (PS1). It was one of the first, if not the first, game consoles I owned and it had a profound effect on my future. I can trace the history of how I got involved in computers back to playing and modding
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Little Things That Made Amiga Great
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…
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Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
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What would happen if computers never got any faster?
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech…
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FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.
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