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History & Retro Computing

The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 92 posts.

2009
64

Debian decides to adopt time-based release freezes

[08 Oct 2009] Robotic Submarine Running Debian Wins International Competition [07 Oct 2009] Debian pushes development of kFreeBSD port [23 Sep 2009] First Debian Mini Conference to be held in Taiwan [05 Sep 2009] Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 updated [06 Aug 2009] 2009 Annual International Debian Conference finished…

68

Keynes, Explained Briefly

If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat…

72

Google Multivac

In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows" ). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world's…

78

The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency

This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…

82

The 6502 in “The Terminator”

In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800’s view several times. It is well-known that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800’s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: It’s Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of…

83

The original IBM Thinkpad

This is the notepad (the pencil and paper kind) that in the late 80s / early 90s inspired an IBM researcher to name the company's new mobile computer the ThinkPad. To me, the IBM ThinkPad was the classic laptop computer to have. At least that was the case until I went full-time Apple and the Chinese

84

ha ha only serious

[from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, ‘Ha Ha Only Kidding’] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or…

86

Some AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny Hillis, who would later found Connection Machines, Inc. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of…

88

P.S.: The Best of Intentions

Operations in Lisp, Scheme, and other dynamically-typed languages typically dispatch on representational type information rather than intentional type information. Several broad classes of bugs and confusions can be traced to improper attempts to recover intentional type information from representation types.

89

Zawinski's Law

“ Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can. ” Coined by Jamie Zawinski (who called it the “ Law of Software Envelopment ”) to express his belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into toolkits and…

90

Partmaps.org

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