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A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world
The following brief post is once again offered largely for the sake of interest, being concerned with the furthest limits of the distributio...
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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 202 posts.
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The Man Who Almost Never Succeeded (2012)
## The Rather Sad Story of the Father of American Photography It’s been a long time since I did a photography history article. I generally prefer the early days of photography. People just were, I…
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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announ
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Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM
It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…
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Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
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The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
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Why is there ancient Greek text on Afghan banknotes?
This, as I probably don’t need to tell you, is a banknote. To be specific, it’s a 10-afghani banknote printed in 2004 (my thanks to Dr Amelia Dowler of the BM for that astonishingly pre…
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Implementing VisiCalc (2003)
I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…
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Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
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ACLU History
In the years following World War I, America was gripped by the fear that the Communist Revolution that had taken place in Russia would spread to the United States. As is often the case when fear outweighs rational debate, civil liberties paid the price. In November 1919 and January 1920, in what notoriously became…
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Quote Origin: Computer Memory: 640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone
Bill Gates? James E. Fawcette? Nancy Andrews? Jerry Pournelle? InfoWorld? Apocryphal?
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NATO Expansion: What Gorbachev Heard
Western leaders gave multiple assurances against NATO expansion to Gorbachev in 1990-1991 according to declassified American, Russian, British, Germans documents
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The Patriot Missile Failure
On February 25, 1991, during the Gulf War, an American Patriot Missile battery in Dharan, Saudi Arabia, failed to track and intercept an incoming Iraqi Scud missile. The Scud struck an American Army barracks, killing 28 soldiers and injuring around 100 other people. A report of the General Accounting office…
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Days of Rage
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
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Book Review: Seeing Like A State
I. Seeing Like A State is the book G.K. Chesterton would have written if he had gone into economic history instead of literature. Since he didn’t, James Scott had to write it a century later.…
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Hardcore History 59 The Destroyer of Worlds
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How Microsoft Lost the API War
Here’s a theory you hear a lot these days: “Microsoft is finished. As soon as Linux makes some inroads on the desktop and web applications replace desktop applications, the mighty empir…
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The Atomic Bomb Considered As Hungarian High School Science Fair Project
I. A group of Manhattan Project physicists created a tongue-in-cheek mythology where superintelligent Martian scouts landed in Budapest in the late 19th century and stayed for about a generation, a…