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The Unix Magic Poster
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
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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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Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
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“MP3 is dead” missed the real, much better story
If you read the news , you may think the MP3 file format was recently officially “killed” somehow, and any remaining MP3 holdouts should all move to AAC now. These are all simple rewrites of Fraunhofer IIS’ announcement that they’re terminating the MP3 patent-licensing program.
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Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
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The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
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Dave Herman’s contributions to Rust
I think the Rust language is a big success. When I think back on it I am in awe: so much had to go right to get where we are, and there were so many opportunities to go wrong. It took many tiny miracles for the Rust language to become what it has. Those miracles didn’t happen by accident though: each one was created…
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
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Ken Thompson really did launch his "trusting trust" trojan attack in real life
Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" compiler Trojan attack was not just a thought experiment. In fact, Usenet poster Jay Ashworth stated that, from personal communications, Thompson really did launch this attack in real life and successfully compromised the Unix Support Group at Bell Labs. Recently, I've rediscovered this…
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If Looks Could Kill
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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British Museum makes 1.9M images available for free
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
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The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
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Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
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How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
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Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine
Тяжелый РПКСН проекта 941 по отечественной класификации: АКУЛА,по НАТовской Typhoon/ Это РПКСН III поколения. У корабля 2 прочных корпуса расположенных параллельно и несколько прочных модулей связанных единым наружным корпусом.Он несет 20 твердотопливных БР расположенных между прочными корпусами. В…
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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
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How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
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Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount (2018)
I designed and 3D Printed a Canon EF Mount for my Game Boy Camera.
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Discord, or the Death of Lore
I chose the life, it didn’t choose me. I could have walked away from it a long time ago, and I’ve certainly shifted my focus over the years. But I still hold the heft and halter, the on…
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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…
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"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it
Yahoo's public chat rooms have passed away . It is for the best, for the spam had spread everywhere. But they had a good run, operating for a decade and a half, an Internet eternity.
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Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
Here is a link to full schematics. Thanks to whoever made this. I just found a few issues with it. The CLK input to the 7474 on page 2 should be HRESET, not CLK. Pin 5 of the 555's on pages 5 and 6 should be connected to the capacitor. Also some of the nodes are inconsistently labeled.
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Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.