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Id Software Programming Principles
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo...
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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd
Introduction I've been on a bit of a floppy disc protection odyssey recently. This will probably be the last floppy disc related post for so...
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Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
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Whence '\n'?
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
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Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP
Nothing in the news media yet, but many folks on Twitter and colleague Nassim Taleb are reporting that the father of fractal geometry is dead at age 85. We’re n
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Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the…
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They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
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What made the NES so interesting?
I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interestin...
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What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.
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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
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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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