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Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk?
One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. "At home found all well," he wrote in his diary, "but the m...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 139 posts.
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Crazy Eddie Fraud
The Crazy Eddie fraud may appear smaller and gentler than the massive billion-dollar frauds exposed in recent times
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Lost Generation: The Relay Computers
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
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Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
Google trends, Apple, Google Chrome and plenty of developers put a cross on Flash. In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different. Credentials I wrote my first line of code in ActionScript 2.0 it was 13 years ago and it was streamlined with the style of web. Big boom of
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How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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A Norwegian who knew his tortoises so well that he changed history
This article has previously been published in Norwegian in Aftenposten Historie no. 6, 2015 and Biolog no, 1, 2014. Due to several reques...
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Pascal at Apple
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
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Disassembling Jak and Daxter
I don't work at Naughty Dog, and I don't have any secret knowledge of Jak & Daxter, except what I figured out myself from the disc. So a lot of this may well be wrong. Take a pinch of salt with it.
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The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
Tomorrow I head for “ Sci Foo ” at the Googleplex. I proposed a discussion session there, “Are We Becoming Less Cooperative? If So, Why?” and I’d like to use today’s blog to help…
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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“You’re Not the Customer, You’re the Product”
Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Claire Wolfe? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
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The practice of programming, 18 years later
Over the new year holiday time I had a chance to get away from it all, and snuck up to Finland to sit in a lodge on the Gulf of Finland, sip coffee, take saunas and read. I brought along a few books, the only programming one being Brian W …
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Baking Bread with the Romans: Part II – Panis Quadratus
Taste the daily life of Romans with this recipe for Panis Quadratus: The infamous sectioned bread excavated at Pompeii and preserved for millenia after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
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Bruce Lee’s Letters to Himself About Authenticity, Personal Development
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy… actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than …
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Transparency effects in SNES and Genesis games via composite video artifacts
Vintage computers and retro gaming
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Hidden dungeons of the London Underground
Underneath the London Underground, lies another city
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Eye-witness stories from Chernobyl
On the thirty-first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history, over one hundred people from the former Soviet Union shared their …
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Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
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Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
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Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch – C64 Demo Effect (2016)
This article describes the inner workings of Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch ( MISC ), a new C64 demo effect introduced in my demo Lunatico .
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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
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How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
When an experiment with existing open source technology just cherry-picks results to make it look good
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What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…