Japanese Typewriters
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
Oldschool planar graphics If you ever work with old hardware, like writing an NES emulator or reverse engineering an old Amiga game, you ...
The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky , the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted…
**Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine** At the height of the Cold War NATO submariners found themselves confronting a Soviet submarine which not only greatly out-performed their own boats, but which could operate beyond the reach of their weapons… Read More >….
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Who knew that the knowledge of the true progenitor of the action RPG would be hidden in a stuffy basement in Akihabara, Tokyo?
Although the name 'New England' is now firmly associated with the east coast of America, this is not the first place to be called that. In t...
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
The top level domain of Slovakia is operated by a private company which abuses its monopoly. In the Central Europe it is something unusual.
What if you could counterfeit so much money that it stopped being illegal?
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
randomwraith.com - LEGO, Beer & pastimes
Tomu is a super cheap Open Source Hardware 24 MHz ARM computer with 8 KB of RAM and 64 KB of ROM that fits into your USB connector! Of course I had to put Commodore 64 BASIC on it, which can be accessed through the USB-Serial port exposed by the device.
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versi…
Wherein the author discusses (another) accident of history.
What do a recent A List Apart article , the ad blocker discussion of a few months back, and my browser testing plans have in common?
A food history blog, focusing mainly on early medieval food and French bread history, written by Jim Chevallier (visit chezjim.com for more). .
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
Explore the intriguing history of Eliza, a pioneering chatbot, and learn how to implement a basic version in Go, unraveling the roots of conversational AI.
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
The Official Wendy Carlos HomePage. The definitive Web collection of information about the pioneer synthesist and composer (and solar eclipse photographer), including a "Write Wendy" Maildrop.
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
The past was not as foreign as we think.
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
The physical data format on a Commodore 1541 5¼-inch floppy disk as used by the C64 is completely defined in software. The drive’s operating system fits 170 KB on a disk. This article explores different strategies, each with its pros and cons, to fit up to 246 KB.