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The 7-bit Internet
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 104 posts.
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts
“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
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Perl is 26 Today
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
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Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
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Wil Shipley: My “Doom” 20th Anniversary Stories
The way I got into the software business (besides learning to code) was to use every piece of software I could find and send the developers ...
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The Deep Insights of Alan Kay
If you haven’t heard of Alan Kay you’ll likley have heard one of his many famous quotes, the most popular, likely his 1971 gem: The best …
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Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those…
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First actual computer bug was found today, 66 years ago
On the 9th September, 1947, operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard University, found a bug. And, in so doing, made history.
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The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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Turning the Apple //e into a lisp machine, part 1
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level
In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathema...
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Apple Core Rot: Introduction
This is the first page only. Use the popup menu at top right for subsequent pages.
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North Korea 2013 – A travel journal
In summer 2013 I traveled to the most isolated country in the world. I've experienced expected and unexpected things. This is my illustrated travel journal.
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Message threading (1997-2002)
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
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MIT Legal repudiated Xbox hacker too
I am joining three academic research web sites, SIFT and Polyphen (websites for predicting disease mutations) and CRAVAT (a website for predicting cancer mutations), in a moment of silence to mark Aaron Swartz’ passing. On January 25, we will bring down our sites for the day to honor his contributions and mark the…
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Building Photoshop 1.0
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…