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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
C functions may be used recursively; that is, a function may call itself either directly or indirectly. Uninquiring souls may take this as just another peculiarity of those C folk, of whose ways their neighbours speak little to outsiders but much among themselves.
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
Two weeks ago I filed a bug report on Digg.com , explaining several XSS vulnerabilities and bugs I found. Some of these were (and some still are!) very critical. A day later, I got an automated response to my report:
Poincare official problem description
This letter marks the time when the change began, but the letter did not cause the change. The transformation of the company was wrought by numerous people, working long, largely uncompensated hours, at daunting and unfamiliar tasks, as the workload only piled higher. Progress could be measured only by realising in…
Debt has always involved institutions that control debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era that we have seen the creation of a planetary administrative system that protects the interests of creditors.
The programming language Pascal has become the dominant language of instruction in computer science education. It has also strongly influenced languages developed subsequently, in particular Ada.
Some time ago I wrote an entry that got some attention about the Blu-ray format and why I refuse to release anything on it. It’d be nice to release the text adventure documentary in what Blu-…
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting my parents and getting out an old computer. One of the first computers I used a lot was the Shar...
A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31…
If you've listened to the anti-Microsoft crowd, you've probably heard this phrase. A web search returns a wide range of attributions, everything from an alleged battle cry to just short of an official company motto. The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of…
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.
This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...
QRP(Low Power Amateur Radio)
One of EFF's first major legal victories was Bernstein v. Department of Justice, a landmark case that resulted in establishing code as speech and changed United States export regulations on encryption software, paving the way for international e-commerce. We represented Daniel J. Bernstein, a...
On January 28th, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched at 11:38am on the 6-day STS-51-L mission. During the first 3 seconds of liftoff the o-rings (o-shaped loops used to connect two cylinders
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
WASHINGTON - One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has "left." "Left" is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for "died." "Died" is the word he used to signify "stopped doing math." Erdos never died. He continued doing math, notoriously a young person's field, right…
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
Super Phénix: Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Station, River Rhone (Sur le Rhone) Creys-Malville, Isere, France, Centrale Nucleaire Europeen...
