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The Paris Compressed-Air Power Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 178 posts.
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Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
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The Origin of ‘Script Kiddie’
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
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“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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Happy Birthday, XMPP: 20th Anniversary of Jabber
Explore and join the Movim network
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Just a Drop in the Bucket (1994)
Subject: mother of all grease fires Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 17:34:09 PDT From: Brian Reid [email address lost in the bog standard forwarding frenzy]
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Take a Look at the Crossrail Station Under Bond Street
Of all the Crossrail stations, the most controversial has to be Bond Street - as it's so behind schedule that it might not open when the Elizabeth line's own delayed opening takes place.
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What the Royal Astronomical Society in 1884 Tells Us About Python Today
The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
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The Founding of Google Maps (2015)
How four partners took an idea from a whiteboard to the browser
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“Bicycle of the Mind”
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
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The Paris Pneumatic Clock Network (2018)
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
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Von Neumann’s critique of automata theory and logic in computer science (1947)
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
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Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
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Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface.
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Aztec Political Thought (2013)
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
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Why airplane windows have round corners (2016)
It's to prevent them from killing you
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Powering a Mainframe
The last few days have been eventful. I was contacted by the datacenter that the mainframe's cage is now ready for moving in, and the power ...
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Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
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Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro
In 1981, the BBC set out to educate Great Britain about computers. It did a really good job.
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