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On compiling 34 year old C code
The 34 year old C code is the C code for ed and sed from Unix Version 7. I’ve been getting it to compile on a modern POSIXish system. Some changes had to be made. But not very many. The union…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 109 posts.
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How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
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Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently , I'm not alone .
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Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
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The Hypercard Legacy
Apple’s forgotten software gem was a last breath for democratized computing. Can it be revived?
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The Infamous Windows “Hello World” Program
A recent blog post by consultant John Cook reminded everybody about the infamous “Hello World” programs in the early chapters of the first five editions of Programming Windows:
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The myth of the fall
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
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Ten Years of World of Warcraft
WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…
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Where have you gone, Peter Norton?
Recently on Facebook, my friend, nerd extraordinaire Esther Schindler, shared a photograph of herself wearing an old T-shirt and challenged her followers to identify it: Either you have no idea what that image means, or you know exactly what it is. It's the torso, rolled-up sleeves and fol
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Where the term "Zero Day" comes from
After seeing a FOIA request earlier today that someone created asking for FBI training documents that teach staff how to understand/communicate using hacker leet-speak, I was reminded about something I’ve wanted to put in virtual ink for a while.
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Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU
If you haven't read my Nintendo 3DS intro blog post first, I'd suggest it as it's a fun short read that gives some backstory of my interest...
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Lost Civilizations of the Andes
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
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How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
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The Internet Arcade
When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side).…
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M/S Estonia accident radio transcript
Transcript of VHF channel 16 on the night of the Estonia disaster.
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How medieval astronomers made trig tables
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
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The origin of “log in” (2011)
We do it dozens of times a day, every day, but why do we call it logging in? “Log in” is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online li…
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Doom on ZPU
The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM wa...
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A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404 (2012)
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
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Each New Boot a Miracle – DOSBOX in the Browser
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 sy…
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The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
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Grumpy Gamer – SCUMM Notes from the C64
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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1971 Social Engineering Attack
From Betty Medsger’s book on the 1971 FBI burglary (page 22): As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft…
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The JSMESS Sound Emergency
UPDATE: I’m happy to say a developer has come forward and we’re out of the woods on sound. It’s not perfect, but the web audio API isn’t perfect and we’re much better …