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A Classic of Soviet Engineering - The Typhoon-class sub
In one of my sailing classes, one of my shipmates was a Russian ex-navyman who served on a Delta IV class (designated
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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Space Shuttle computer has 1MB of RAM
NASA's space shuttle was controlled by a computer running on only 1 megabyte of RAM. The hardware was over 30 years old during its last flight.
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…
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Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found.
As you probably know, in the late 70’s Panic was writing VAX/VMS automation code for the textile industry. Cotton attenuators, zipper sublimation, loom dynamics, that sort of thing. What you might not know is that, once the early 80’s arrived, Panic got hit hard with two things: unkempt mutton chops, and Pac-Man Fever.
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Greybeard Stories: The Black Team
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
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The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Previous: Lisp's Apparent Failures Up: Lisp's Apparent Failures Next: Good Lisp Programming is Hard
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James Burke’s Connections: A BBC History of Innovation
Science historian James Burke’s entire iconic Connections series, tracing the origin of innovation, is now available for free online.
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Secret History of Silicon Valley Part VI: Every World War II Movie was Wrong
This is Part VI of how I came to write “The Secret History of Silicon Valley“. This post makes a lot more sense if you look at the earlier posts as well as the video and slides. ——̵…
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Steve wants us to make the Macintosh boot faster
We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…
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BYTE, the most beloved computer-magazine brand of all, is coming back.
What's the most-loved computer magazine of all time? There's really only one contender: BYTE, which was founded in 1975 and ceased print publication a dozen years ago. If you worked in computer magazines, as I did, you got used to old-timers comparing your publication unfavorably to BYTE. (And actua
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Dmitry Medvedev declares official holiday in Russia: Programmer's Day
Russia's President Medvedev has decreed a new holiday for the country: Президент России Дмитрий Медведев своим указом установил профессиона...
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The story of Mel (1983)
A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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Lead Poisoning and Rome
"The bellows are burned, the lead is consumed of the fire; the founder melteth in vain: for the wicked are not plucked away. Reprobate silver shall men call them, because the Lord hath rejected them."
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The Chaos (1922)
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
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Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
By Nick Szabo, 2002
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The British Government should apologize to Alan Turing
When I started writing The Geek Atlas there was one name that was getting in the book no matter what: Alan Turing . Alan Turing matters on ...
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Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
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How Pinball Ate itself: The Economics of Pinball
Will…You…Play…Black Knight Again?? There is a reason I live in Winnetka and not in Evanston. And it’s not because, as Sandeep would put it, I like to get up 30 minutes earl…
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Bringing improved PDF support to Google Chrome
Millions of web users rely on PDF files every day to consume a wide variety of text and media content. To enable this, a number of plug-ins ...