The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 422 posts.
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
My personal website.
Information regarding Nintendo's rollout of the Nintendo Network shutdown
This map story is about one specific map, the only one remaining from the Roman …
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023121 points5 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
Blue Scuti made history, breaking NES Tetris in a way that was previously only theoretical. Here is a glimpse into the what, who, and how.
A club for Meccano enthusiasts in London, holding four meetings each year and a public Meccano Show in Falconwood.
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
Center for the Study of the Public Domain2023368 points208 commentsSociety, Policy & Culture details
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle by Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain. The first…
+ Ordeals and Plea Bargaining
It was a happy time for PC users. Microsoft had just delivered Windows 95, an incredibly vast improvement over windows 3.1 and DOS.
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
Whose Creators They Failed to Credit
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
