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Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The Life and Times of Maxis, Part 1: SimEverything
I’m still to this day just blown away by continental drift and things like that, stuff that most people think sounds pretty boring.
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The Early History of Smalltalk (1993)
Permission to copy without fee all or part of this material is granted provided that the copies are not made or distributed for direct commercial advantage, the ACM copyright notice and the title of the publication and its date appear, and notice is given that copying is by permission of the Association for Computing…
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Where have you gone, Peter Norton?
Recently on Facebook, my friend, nerd extraordinaire Esther Schindler, shared a photograph of herself wearing an old T-shirt and challenged her followers to identify it: Either you have no idea what that image means, or you know exactly what it is. It's the torso, rolled-up sleeves and fol
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Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.
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The Reign of Alexander III of Macedon
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024127 points106 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly k…
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What “Roguelike” Meant
Several recently released games have rekindled the old discussions on the meaning of the word “roguelike”. This post is an attempt to…
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The bandwidth of a Boeing 747 and its impact on web browsing
Suppose you needed to transfer 1TB of data (perhaps your home movie collection) from San Francisco to London. What would be the fastest route? Put the disk on British Airways flight 286 at SFO, or transfer it across the Internet using a 100 Mbps connection?
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SS United States, the fastest passenger liner ever built
The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…
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Time travel in Braid
I bought Braid on the promise of lavish visuals and neat puzzles with temporal mechanics, and on this basis I was rewarded. I found some frustration with the controls, which I eventually traced to dodgy keyboard drivers - the game wouldn't register the up or down arrows while I ...
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Unexpected patterns in historical astronomical observations
Researchers at Nordita at Stockholm University have analyzed flashes of light on astronomical plates from the early 1950s and found statistical connections between the times of these flashes, nuclear weapons tests and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The results are presented in two studies published…
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It took a decade for the Declaration of Independence to matter in American life
Two Stanford historians discuss how the United States’ Declaration of Independence became one of the pillars of American civic life and other lesser-known historical facts about what happened on July 4, 1776.
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Prayer, Placement, and Absolution: Peter Hristoff on Islamic Prayer Rugs (2015)
Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff meditates on the role of Islamic prayer rugs (seccades) and the role they play in his own creative output.
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A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
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Was the NE2000 really that bad?
Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and clones. Especially in the Linux community, the NE2000 seems to have had rather bad…
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The year of peak might and magic
Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO , it started to become obvious to everyone who worked for him that the torch he carried for computer games no longer…
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Imperial Wars Always Come Home
There’s a person I think about from time to time.
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A technical history of Acorn Computers
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
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Where the term "Zero Day" comes from
After seeing a FOIA request earlier today that someone created asking for FBI training documents that teach staff how to understand/communicate using hacker leet-speak, I was reminded about something I’ve wanted to put in virtual ink for a while.
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V7 Unix had no stack size limit, and when Unix acquired one
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Inside the 8086 processor's instruction prefetch circuitry
The groundbreaking 8086 microprocessor was introduced by Intel in 1978 and led to the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and se...
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Japanese Handsaws: The Maebiki Ooga
A famous blockprint by Hokusai titled “Mount Fuji Seen from the Mountains of Totomi,” showing a crew of sawyers rip-sawing a timber into boards using maebiki ooga saws, one man on top a…
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The Evolution of Direct3D
alexstjohn.com is your first and best source for information about alexstjohn. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
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Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021127 points32 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…