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C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." - CS Lewis
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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Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)
My personal website.
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Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2025334 points192 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
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You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
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Photos of the An-225 Mriya – the world’s largest aircraft
An-225 Mriya (which is referred to Dream from Ukrainian) is the heaviest airlift cargo aircraft ever taken off in the sky. The maximum takeoff weight makes 640 tons. An-225 was designed, due to the necessity to create the air transport system for the Soviet reusable Space Shuttle Buran. This is the…
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The Thrill of Flying the SR-71 Blackbird
Aviator's love for the SR-71
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The Emularity
Last week, on the heels of the DOS emulation announcement, one of the JSMESS developers, James Baicoianu, got Windows 3.11 running in a window with Javascript. That’s impressive enough on its…
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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel
Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get
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The Graphing Calculator Story - a developer who refused to leave
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
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Industrial Literacy
When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it
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The Door Close Button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
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Alonzo Church: Architect of computer intelligence
The man who gave us the solution to the Entscheidungsproblem
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Nobel Prize in Physics awarded to Englert and Higgs
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by…
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It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
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Welcome (back) to Macintosh
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
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How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
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Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
Visual Effects Supervisor - Scott Squires Visual Effects Director of Photography - Patrick Sweeney The effects for this movie were orig...
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Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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