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The truth about C and Unix history
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 130 posts.
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“Flower of Battle,” a combat manual created in the first decade of the 1400s
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
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Atari Vax Mail, Memos and Status Reports: 1982-1992 (2001)
I worked for Atari and then one of its successor companies (Atari Games) for 13 years, designing hardware for coin-operated video games.
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A database of SMS cards: The technology inside IBM's 1960s mainframes
IBM's mainframes of the 1960s are based on an interesting technology - Standard Modular System cards or SMS cards. These cards, created in ...
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Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
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A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…
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A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
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Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
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When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
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The MS-DOS Showcase
2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…
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NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
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A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
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Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
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They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
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Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
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The Tomb of Queen Esther in Persia
“How much is the taxi to Khomeini Square?” “ Gheymati nadore, it does not cost anything”, the old taxi driver spreads his arms...
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