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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
C ard punches of various types, models and makes featured an option to print the characters encoded by the holes punched in any of the columns in human readable form onto the top of the card. While it is well known that these characters were printed by a 5 × 7 dot matrix, comprehensive information on what these…
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”
Impressive, but too late to the party
On cartography as historical argument
dsp's personal site
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a…
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]
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.
Searchable Human Knowledge
Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past "AI", it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
The 34 year old C code is the C code for ed and sed from Unix Version 7. I’ve been getting it to compile on a modern POSIXish system. Some changes had to be made. But not very many. The union…
This is the first of a planned five-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquit…
How did the Apollo astronauts communicate on their trip to the Moon, 240,000 miles back to Earth? They used a 32-pound amplifier, built ar...
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
A few weeks ago, I wanted to use one of the vintage IBM 1401 mainframe computers at the Computer History Museum, but the computer wasn't wor...
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
A lot has been said about the role of artillery in World War I, in both its intensity and ferocity. On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and s…
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
