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Transiting the Suez Canal in a Private Sailboat (2003)
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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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Wing Commander III
Movies and computer games are my two favorite things. If I weren’t doing one I’d be doing the other.
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Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
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An elegy for GNU and RMS
Assorted thoughts about rms, the GNU project, the FSF, and the future.
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The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
Camel or rope? Examining the Greek word ‘kamilos’ and the origins of a persistent myth about the Bible.
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Ultima VI
After Richard Garriott and his colleagues at Origin Systems finished each Ultima game — after the manic final crunch of polishing and testing, after the release party, after the triumphant show appearances and interviews in full Lord British regalia — there must always arise the daunting question of what to do next…
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
668
Aaron Swartz really did co-author RSS spec at age 14
In a discussion about journalism on venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, Dave Winer writes: ... professionals make plenty of these kinds of mistakes. For example last week the esteemed NY Times said RSS was software and that it was co-written by a 14-year old on a mail list. It is neither of those things. They never…
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Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored…
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IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?
It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.
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“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more
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I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
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Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)
Many point to the fact that the Soviet Union collapse occurred as the Soviets were baited into trying to compete with the defense build-up ...
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Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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A prescient footnote
Back in 2004, who could have imagined Apple’s astonishing rise to overtake Microsoft as the most valuable tech company in the world?
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The Entire History of Soviet Rocket Engines
Soviet rocket engines - this article is about their history, their development, their use and their rockets.
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A little story about the `yes` Unix command
What’s the simplest Unix command you know?<br /…
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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
One keyboard bug three decades in the making
680
The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
681
David J.C. MacKay, Machine Learning pioneer, dies
Thank you so much to lots of lovely friends who have offered to visit me in hospital! Ramesh and I are wanting to keep life really simple...
682
Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
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The Joy of Computer History Books
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
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Reverse Engineering SimTower
Creating a perfect clone of SimTower in the browser
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Using grape harvest dates to estimate summer temperature over 650 years
It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even …
687
A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
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Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped
Chris Hayes of MSNBC reminds us that the good guys and bad guys of history are not entirely clear as they're happening. Heather Parton of digsby blog passes along a transcript of his recent...
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Masks, Smoke, and Mirrors: The story of EgyptAir flight 804
In 2016, an EgyptAir A320 spiraled into the Mediterranean, killing 66 people. Was it an act of sabotage, or something even scarier?