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1983: Suspended
A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique perspectives.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 263 posts.
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When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
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JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
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Restaurant prices in the 19th and 20th centuries (2009)
Restaurant prices in the 19th century (followed by 20th, below) Note: Until the mid-19th century prices were often quoted in shillings and pence, or in Spanish dollars. One Spanish bit = 12½¢; One …
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Apple 2001
David Shayer worked at Apple for 14 years, and he has a wild experience to share. Apple has a unique culture, and David will give us an insider view of what it was like for him at Apple during the 2000s, roughly between 2001 to 2015 when Apple transformed into the powerhouse that it is today. David worked as a…
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The curious history of NovaMin toothpaste (2018)
I buy my toothpaste from overseas through eBay. Wonder why?
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Was the NE2000 really that bad?
Over the last few months I have been on and off digging into the history of early PC networking products, especially Ethernet-based ones. In that context, it is impossible to miss the classic NE2000 adapter with all its offshoots and clones. Especially in the Linux community, the NE2000 seems to have had rather bad…
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V7 Unix had no stack size limit, and when Unix acquired one
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing an Empire
This is the fifth and final part (I, II, III, IV) of our series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as an i…
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Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
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Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…
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The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter
Reading time: 15 minutes There are many significant differences between Latin and its linguistic descendants, the Romance languages. One that stands out from the rest is grammatical gender. Latin h…
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The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans? Part I: Beginnings and Legends
Who were the Romans? How did they understand themselves as a people and ‘Roman’ as an identity? And what were the implications of that understanding – and perhaps more importantly…
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Book Review: Double Fold
Finalist #6 of the book review contest
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Ancient Babylonian Algorithms: The Earliest Programs
An interactive, illustrated timeline of historic moments in humankind's quest for information. With annotations by Jeremy Norman.
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Copy-protection for vinyl in the 1970s (2008)
When I was thinking about an iconography for DRM, I began to think back to the old days of recording vinyl onto my portable tape deck using a 5-pin DIN plug to connect the two machines, the advent of tape-to-tape decks, and being poised over the pause button to record tracks from John Peel sessions. It was all so…
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Japanese Typewriters
September 30, 2009 at 5:30 pm · Filed under Japanese History , Japanese Technology
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A forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast (2015)
Although the name 'New England' is now firmly associated with the east coast of America, this is not the first place to be called that. In t...
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Wendy Carlos on Bob Moog (2005)
The Official Wendy Carlos HomePage. The definitive Web collection of information about the pioneer synthesist and composer (and solar eclipse photographer), including a "Write Wendy" Maildrop.
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The Ruin of War
This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last week, we lo…
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Office 2000 is good to go
The biggest competition for Office 2000 was…Office 97. –Realization at the end of the project
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USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018)
**US Navy SubmarineAircraft Carrier design** In the late 1950s the US Navy experimented with the concept of aircraft carrying submarines armed with jet fighters… Read More >….
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The origin of “tweet” at Twitter (2013)
Last week, one of my colleagues informed me that the word “tweet” was now included in the Oxford English Dictionary (see “Quiet announcement” at the end of the page.) The noun and verb tweet (in the social-networking sense) has just been added to the OED. This breaks at least one OED rule, namely that a […]
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Soyuz spacecraft digital clock teardown
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
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A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air […]
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Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook
This is the first part of a planned five-part series (I, II, III, IV, V) covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss …