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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 155 posts.
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The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
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How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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Where Vim Came From
Tracing the long lineage of software that brought us Vim.
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What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.
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Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
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What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
Imagining a childhood encounter with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
Oldest registered domain names in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains
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Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
An unabridged history of RSS' triumphs and failures.
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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
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“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
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Computer science as a lost art (2015)
An old friend of mine asked me this in email last night...
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Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…