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History of the browser user-agent string (2008)
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 61 posts.
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Hennessy and Patterson win Turing Award
Hennessy and Patterson pioneered a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures that has had enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Their reduced instruction set computer (RISC) approach has led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects…
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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
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A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
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For a brief period, the Windows kernel tried to deal with gamma rays
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition
With the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub complete, Nat Friedman joins as CEO.
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Worst Computer Bugs in History: Therac-25 (2017)
The Worst Computer Bugs in History is a mini series to commemorate the discovery of the first computer bug seventy years ago. Although these stories are more extreme than most software bugs engineers will encounter during their careers, they are worth studying for the insights they can offer into software development…
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CRPG Book Released
Four years ago I began a journey. On Feb 5 2014 I posted the results of the RPG Codex’s Top 70 poll, in which we elected the best CRPGs of all time. But I felt that a simple list was too dry&…
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1961 The books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth, the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after…
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Riving, a Viking-age woodworking technique
Viking-age smiths used the process known as riving to reduce a tree trunk to planks or to other useful articles. Rather than sawing the wood, they split it. As a result, the grain of the wood follows the piece being fabricated, creating a much stronger item than if it had been sawn. It's one of several reasons why…
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Debian 9.4 released
[10 Nov 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.6 released [05 Aug 2018] DebConf18 closes in Hsinchu and DebConf19 dates announced [14 Jul 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.5 released [23 Jun 2018] Updated Debian 8: 8.11 released [01 Jun 2018] Debian 7 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [10 Mar 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.4 released
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Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES
The Super Nintendo classic started life on the 8-bit NES. That version was considered lost...until now.
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A Brief History of High Availability
The perennial question of homo sapiens is, 'How did we get here?' Today we're going to take a crack at answering that: where 'here' is defined as 'high availability for web services'.
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How 4000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino Its Worst Week (2015)
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
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FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
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The First 15 Years of PyPy – A Personal Retrospective
A few weeks ago I (=Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick) gave a keynote at ICOOOLPS in Amsterdam with the above title. I was very happy to have bee...
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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Creating Windows XP Icons (2001)
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
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So Long Last /8 and Thanks For All the Allocations
On 17 April 2018, we allocated the last available block of 1,024 addresses in 185/8 - the last /8 we received from IANA back in 2011. This article looks at how this address space was allocated and how it is used today. It's important to keep in mind that while 185/8 is finished, we still have aroun…
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DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
East-German spy radio set Type 2, used during the Cold War by agents working for East-Germany (DDR).
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