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Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
A blog about software craft and quality
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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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8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
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Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty
It’s 1986 and you’ve got a 31 tons of copper, in the form of a giant 46 meter tall statue, that’s looking a bit worse for wear.
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Eulogy to _why
Unfortunately I’m short on time at the moment (trying to launch a project this week) but I have to say, at least, a few words about the hacker and artist _why .
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555 timer teardown: inside the world's most popular IC
This article is translated into Vietnamese at: Bên trong chíp định thời 555 . If you've played around with electronic circuits, you prob...
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The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
The rise and fall of yogh
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Internet Explorer 11: “Don’t call me IE”
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
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Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
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How the weak can win – A primer on protracted war
Thanks to our volunteer narrator, this post is now available in audio format. This week, in an effort to fill in some of the theoretical basis for thinking about how weaker powers think about fight…
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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.
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How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
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The Martians of Budapest
The Martians of Budapest”, sometimes referred to as simply “The Martians” is a colloquial term used to describe a group of prominent Hungarian physicists and mathematicians who emigrated to the United States following the Great Purge of 1933. The term refers to—what appeared, from the perspective of Americans—to be a…
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Monkey Island PC-speaker music player
The Monkey Island (TM) PC-Speaker music player
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
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The Internet With A Human Face
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
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What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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Old People Icons That Don't Make Sense Anymore
The Floppy Disk Icon means 'save' for a whole generation of people who have ...
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Brood War Korean Translations
As work slowed down during the last couple of weeks of 2024, I decided to redirect some of my energy to hobbies instead of work. One such hobby is StarCraft: Brood War (or BW for short), a classic, highly competitive RTS from '98 that still has an active community today.
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Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
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The decline of deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
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'Be' is nice, end of story
pick a name from the dictionary, it can work
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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer
If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
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How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart p…