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History & Retro Computing

The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 71 posts.

2009
61

The 6502 in “The Terminator”

In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800’s view several times. It is well-known that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800’s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: It’s Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of…

62

The original IBM Thinkpad

This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company's new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full-time Apple and the Chinese

63

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…

65

Some AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…

67

P.S.: The Best of Intentions

Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.

68

Zawinski's Law

“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…

69

Partmaps.org

All hotels in Mallorca. The best selection of Mallorca hotels with reviews and maps. Book in advance and save.

70

be human

Scraping for AI training is killing small websites like ours. Traffic from users is drowned out by bots at a factor of 100 to 1. At times, the load on our server from bots makes our server so unresponsive we can't get in to administer it.

71

Erik Naggum — A Long, Painful History of Time

ABSTRACT The programming language Common Lisp offers a few functions to support the concept of time as humans experience it, including GET-UNIVERSAL-TIME , ENCODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , DECODE-UNIVERSAL-TIME , and GET-DECODED-TIME . These functions assume the existence of a timezone and a daylight saving time regime, such…