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A brief, incomplete, and mostly wrong history of robotics
(An homage to one of my favorite pieces on the internet: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages)
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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The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)
Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…
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A deep history of Halloween
Or, how far back can historical analysis take us?
2136
Isn't she just Misunderstood? The Casio Loopy
Imagine asking Julius Caesar to review the arcade game Galaga. He lacks the knowledge of space that even children have today, and certainly can’t recognize a...
2137
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
2138
Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
2139
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
2140
The Land Before Binary
In the early days of computing, 1 + 1 didn’t always equal 10
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Cores in space: The core memory module from a 1980 Spacelab computer
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiment...
2143
1983: Suspended
A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique perspectives.
2144
Building a Frankenstein 64
👶 From when Mosaic took over Gopher. 🏢 VP of Engineering @ Cloudflare 🕹️ Slightly addicted to retrocomputing 🔍 Hit Ctrl-K to Search
2145
Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
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Powering a Mainframe
The last few days have been eventful. I was contacted by the datacenter that the mainframe's cage is now ready for moving in, and the power ...
2148
A couple of messages about changes to ianVisits
I've been contacted a few times recently about the sharp decline in descriptive images on the events listings.
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Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit. 1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on main...
2151
The Prolog Story (2010)
I’ve told this story in person dozens of times, it’s time to write it down and share it here. I’ve again experimentally recorded a video version (below), which you can view on a non-Flash device here .
2152
Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
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Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
2154
The fifty shades of Latin
In the bird’s-eye view, one might have the comforting illusion that country borders are also language borders. Especially where the bor...
2155
When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
2156
What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
2157
Teaching Apple Cyberdog 1.0 new tricks (featuring OpenDoc)
In the distant nethermists of time, documents once briefly ruled the earth (or at least Mac OS), and to that end I managed to find a verrr...
2158
Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth
DISCLAIMER: The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
2159
A vacuum tube ROM?
Is such a thing possible? Turns out it is, and it’s called a Monoscope. I recently got a Raytheon CK1414 Monoscope with a good getter and a working filament–naturally, I decided to fire…
2160
Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...