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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 98 posts.
ILLEGAL ENGINEERING An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking. The lecture is based round a large wooden safe with a video camera inside, projecting the inside of the door mechanism on a screen. This is currently my favourite lecture to perform. There's something very satisfying about the…
Before Warcraft became a legend, it was a risky DOS-era experiment. This is how it actually began.
Back to: I had a blog entry for you, but I eated it | Forward to: Beer, Boston (and books)
Warcraft almost didn't become Warcraft. Part 2 gets into the hard calls, surprises, and turning points that shaped the hit.
There are rumors that the Obama campaign used an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, though further analysis seems to indicate that these images were fakes. It would be great if someone from the Obama…
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
[10 Nov 2012] Help us to release Wheezy : participate to our BSP marathon [29 Sep 2012] Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.6 released [16 Aug 2012] Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday [13 Aug 2012] Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city [10 Aug 2012] Help the Debian Installer team: test the new version of the…
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
When we wrapped up our recent Pwnium event, we praised the creativity of the submissions and resolved to provide write-ups on how the two e...
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
Studying how an individual's thoughts, emotions, ideas, and aspirations are formed through their interactions with others is the focus of social psychology as
My fourth book.
Ever since learning about the Rubber Room and Blast Room deep below launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center I had been hopeful that I would one day get to photograph this mysterious remnant of the A…
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as " Harmony ". It is due by the end of next year...
Ever since I came across Jürg Lehni’s essay on typographic technology and digital fonts, Typeface As Programme, I’ve been fascinated with the story of Donald E. Knuth and his unexpected contributions to typography. You see, Knuth is a professor and computer scientist well known to pr…
There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...
GoldenEye 64 had a special place in my heart when I was growing up. It was the first game my parents wouldn’t let me buy due to violent content. I saved up allowances and dug up couch treasures for months to taste the forbidden fruit. The effort turned into one of the pillars of my childhood experiences. I still…
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
