1291
How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Generation Nintendo
In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…
1295
Another World
The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than…
1296
A Norwegian who knew his tortoises so well that he changed history
This article has previously been published in Norwegian in Aftenposten Historie no. 6, 2015 and Biolog no, 1, 2014. Due to several reques...
1297
Skate Warrior 1992, 1999, 2020
In The DV Rebel’s Guide, I used this still frame as an example of guerrilla filmmaking taken too far. Which may also be an apt description of the entire film from which it was taken.
1298
Photographs of the Old West
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
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Why the original Macintosh had a screen resolution of 512×324
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic…
1303
Oldest recorded transaction
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
1304
1305
Revisiting the DOS Memory Models
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
1306
Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago...
1307
Remembering Doug Lenat and his quest to capture the world with logic
Stephen Wolfram shares memories of Doug Lenat, early AI pioneer and developer of the CYC system. Their discussions around AI & logic and the potential combined uses of their respective discoveries.
1308
Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns
TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the...
1309
Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026182 points52 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems te…
1310
Farewell, Marvin Minsky
Stephen Wolfram describes his friendship and shared interest in computation with the late Marvin Minsky, pioneer of computation and AI.
1311
Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
1312
Remembering Conway
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
1313
The Heart of Deterrence (2012)
Nuclear strategy is one part cold logic, one part emotional terror.
1314
SQLite Doesn't Use Git
Instead, it uses Fossil as a version control system. Some thoughts.
1315
Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)
Background
1316
Pascal at Apple
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
1317
A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." (1999-2015)
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
1318
DOS on Dope (2010)
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
1319
System Shock
We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…
1320
The End of an Athlon
When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most.