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Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 123 posts.
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Dinosaur and Lisp
Dinosaur is old enough, as well as Lisp, they may like each other. When I am talking about dinosaur here, I mean the dinosaur hiding in Google Chrome, it shows up when "There is no Internet connection".
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What ever happened to Wordstar?
One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — Wordstar.
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
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Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been uploading thousands of Hip-hop Mixtapes into the archive. The resulting collection still has a way to go before it’s everything I have acquired a…
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A Simple Request: VLC.js
Almost five years ago to today, I made a simple proposal to the world: Port MAME/MESS to Javascript. That happened. I mean, it cost a dozen people hundreds of hours of their lives…. and there…
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Happy 20th Birthday, Quake
Twenty years. Wow. Where has all the time gone? We've all had many adventures during those years and Quake spawned many a game franchise and/or game company whether directly or through its influence. For this 20th I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur called QUAKETALK 95. This Quak
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Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro
I was part of the first ever group of foreigners given access to all stations across both lines of the Pyongyang Metro. Here's my experience!
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Code Page 437 Refuses to Die
I am updating volume 2 of Core Java and got stuck on the section on text files in the internationalization chapter. How hard can this be in 2016? Surely everyone uses UTF-8 these days. Or do they? Make a file Test.java
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More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
This is what the inside of the cage looks like. Nearly all of the machines in the cage are Sun Ultra 2s. Attached to nearly all of these boxes are dual sets of MTI JBODs ("Just a Box Of Disks") (either 2500s or 8300s). The newer JBODs (the 8300) make up the majority of the storage arrays in the cage. Nearly all of the…
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They knew it was round, damn it
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
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Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
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Generation Nintendo
In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…
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Farewell, Marvin Minsky
Stephen Wolfram describes his friendship and shared interest in computation with the late Marvin Minsky, pioneer of computation and AI.
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The Heart of Deterrence (2012)
Nuclear strategy is one part cold logic, one part emotional terror.
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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Hitler Uses Docker, Annotated
If you haven’t seen it, this is a very accurate and smart Downfall satire on Docker’s ecosystem, technology, and culture. It’s so good that I thought it would be instructive to an…
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A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video]
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
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The Sega Saturn and Transparency
GOPAY303 adalah platform game digital yang menyediakan strategi pola RTP paling ajaib saat ini. Menyajikan analisis akurat, navigasi kencang, dan aksesibilitas ramah mobile 24 jam.
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Happy 23rd Birthday, DOOM
It's that time of year again, where we say Happy Birthday to one of my most favorite games, DOOM! Every year I try to reveal something about the game's development that hasn't been documented to death. Believe me, DOOM has been documented more than most games. But never fear, I have so much stuff th
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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How old were the inventors of major inventions?
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
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1995 Programming on the Sega Saturn
This is a document I wrote in 1995, while working on Neversoft’s first game: Skeleton Warriors. It was the first game I’d worked on where I did not use 68K Assembly.