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Yosefk - My history with Forth & stack machines
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
1832
Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
1833
Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
DESCENT is a classic 3-D first-person shooter for DOS that was released in 1995, developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions. DESCENT is a contemporary of the other very popular FPS of the time, DOOM by id Software, released just over a year before. However, it is not based on DOOM; the…
1834
Pre-Modern Battlefields (2015)
Image Source.”Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second” –Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancien…
1835
Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
1836
Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
1837
What my dad taught me about AI coding in the 90s
It was a summer holiday, sometime in the late 1990s. I was a young kid, around 8 or so. My dad had taught me the rules of chess before and we played from time to time. But this time was different: As we were about to start he stood up and walked away from the board, sitting down in a chair across the room and facing…
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Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus
I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving…
1840
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…
1841
The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
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Ibn Battuta: A Scholar's Epic Journey (2018)
This morning I stumbled upon [a video](https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/films/title/ibn-battutas-search-for-knowledge) that mentions one of the famous traveler, Ibn Battuta. And the deeper I dig, the more fascinated I am by his journey. It is one thing to visit a place and buy merchandises before return to home…
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The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers (2011)
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
1847
“Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing and Expecting Different Results”
Albert Einstein? Al-Anon? Narcotics Anonymous? Max Nordau? George Bernard Shaw? Samuel Beckett? George A. Kelly? Rita Mae Brown? John Larroquette? Jessie Potter? Werner Erhard?
1848
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 Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
1851
Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller
IBM used some unusual techniques in its integrated circuits, and one of the most visible is packaging them in square metal cans. I've been...
1852
How We Got the Favicon (2017)
The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.
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The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…
1855
Douglas Adams's Mac IIfx
「99歳にもなったら入れる施設なんてあるのだろうか…」こんな悩みを抱えてはいませんか？現代社会は「少子高齢化社会」と呼ばれ、人口に占める高齢者の数が増えてきています。また、医療の発達により寿命はどんどん長くなっており、介護に関する悩みを抱える人も多いのではないでしょうか。
1856
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…
1857
How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
1858
Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook”
"IF FOUND--Please return to Paramount Pictures"
1859
Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
1860
How Miles Davis hired John Coltrane
A fascinating interlude from James Kaplan's new book '3 Shades of Blue'