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My First Death Threat (2004)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 155 posts.
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The Aol Chat Room Monitor Revolt (2014)
In 1999, America Online's volunteer chat room monitors sued the company for back wages. Do today's hot Internet companies risk the same fate?
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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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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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SVG Mask Artwork of the Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 after 44 years: scalable vector mask artwork, Rubylith cutters, replica PCB rev 2, printer emulator code.
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The last new subway line in Japan
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
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The best ping story I've ever heard
Yes, it's true! I'm the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)
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The great Medieval water myth (2013)
A food history blog, focusing mainly on early medieval food and French bread history, written by Jim Chevallier (visit chezjim.com for more). .
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The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
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Examining the core memory module inside a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe
The IBM 1401 mainframe computer was announced in 1959 and by the mid-1960s had become the best-selling computer , extremely popular with me...
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
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The button that isn’t
Is there a big red button that can launch nuclear war? No — but thinking about why there isn't is a nice way into the complexities of command and control issues.
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8088 PC Speaker MOD player: How it’s done
The last 100 seconds of 8088 MPH sound very different to the rest of the demo. The end tune is actually a 4-channel Amiga MOD file (which you can download here ) composed by coda . Playing back a MOD through PC speaker on such a slow machine has never been done before. Here is how we did it.
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The truth about C and Unix history
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
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“Flower of Battle,” a combat manual created in the first decade of the 1400s
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
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Atari Vax Mail, Memos and Status Reports: 1982-1992 (2001)
I worked for Atari and then one of its successor companies (Atari Games) for 13 years, designing hardware for coin-operated video games.
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How Filipino WWII Soldiers Were Written Out of History
How hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought in the U.S. military and helped win World War II. And how history -- and the American government -- forgot them.
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A database of SMS cards: The technology inside IBM's 1960s mainframes
IBM's mainframes of the 1960s are based on an interesting technology - Standard Modular System cards or SMS cards. These cards, created in ...
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Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
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A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…