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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, Day 6: Fixed a chip, data read from disk
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 123 posts.
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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Donald Knuth used an Erlang-like notation
In this blogpost we'll see how Erlang's Syntax already appeared on TAOCP years before the language was even created.
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
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Systems Past: software innovations we actually use (2014)
Note: This is a position piece, not a technical article. Hat tip to Jake Skelcy for requesting such a piece. Computers didn’t always have operating …
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Watching Larry Ellison Become Larry Ellison
In Oracle’s early days Kathryn Gould was the founding VP of Marketing, working there from 1982 to 1984. When I heard that Larry Ellison was stepping down as Oracle’s CEO I asked Kathryn to think ab…
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Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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The Secret Feature of EM-DOSBOX on Internet Archive
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
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So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
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Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
A lot has been said about the role of artillery in World War I, in both its intensity and ferocity. On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and s…
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Learning from Ada
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
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The Road to Ultima V
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
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Sierra Gets Creative
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
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A Simple Explanation: VLC.js
The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun. The best example…
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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The Man Who Knew Infinity
Last night I went to see a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of the new movie about Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. It was extremely good, infinitely better than the most recent high profi…
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Forbidden Spheres
A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
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A Peek into Einstein's Zurich Notebook
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
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South Korean President Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
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So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry , the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years…
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A Tribute to VMware Workstation, Fusion, and Hosted UI
Updated February 2, 2016: Once you learn about our team and who we are, come take a trip down memory lane with us! Yesterday morning, the Hosted UI team, responsible for VMware’s Workstation …
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A Proposal For the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on A.I. (1955)
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
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The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
Wherein the author discusses (another) accident of history.
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The web's original sin
What do a recent A List Apart article , the ad blocker discussion of a few months back, and my browser testing plans have in common?
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A Random Walk Through Ada (2014)
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
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