Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 182 posts.

History & Retro Computing
2016
151

Mainframes as a lifestyle choice

I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…

168

Somali Law

“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…

178

The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized

A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. Provided for historical interest only. The diagrams are a bit dotty, but available in versioins linked below. The text has not been changed, even…

179

A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)

The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…