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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 104 posts.
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The Birth of Standard Error
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
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The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
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The Rest of the Lenna Story
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…
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Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research
I gave a brief talk last night at the Mozilla Research Party (first of a series), which happened to fall on the virtual (public, post-Easter-holiday) celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary .
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Inside the ALU of the 8085 microprocessor
The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works i...
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The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…
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Quote Origin: Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
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Quote Origin: Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
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DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.