61
Lovelace's Leap
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 122 posts.
62
How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings
Here's an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings. In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the…
63
64
Flash is dead. Long live the internet.
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…
65
What Google Learned from Wave and Buzz
สล็อตเว็บตรง แตกง่าย ด้วยการเล่นผ่านโทรศัพท์มือถือสามารถเล่นได้ทุกที่ทุกเวลาตลอด 24 ชั่วโมง ทำให้ได้รับความนิยมอย่างแพร่หลายเหตุปัจจุบัน
66
67
Donald Knuth never told Steve Jobs that he was full of shit
You have probably all heard the following story about Jobs meeting Knuth for the first time in 1983. Steve had managed to get Don Knuth, the legendary Stanford professor of computer science, to give a lunchtime lecture to the Mac team. Knuth is the author of at least a dozen books, including the massive and somewhat...
68
The secret life of punctuation - ¶ (The Pilcrow)
This is a pilcrow: ¶. They crop up surprisingly frequently, bookending paragraphs on websites with a typographic bent, for instance, and teaming up with the section symbol in legal documents to form picturesque reference marks such as §3, ¶7. The pilcrow even appears in Microsoft Word, where it adorns a button which…
69
70
Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
71
72
Google Acquires Over 1,000 IBM Patents
While Google may have lost the recent bidding for Nortel's patent portfolio, they did quietly acquire over a 1,000 patents from IBM this past month.
73
74
Chromium Blog: More about the Chrome HTML Video Codec Change
There has been a lot of discussion regarding this week’s announcement of upcoming changes to HTML video codec support in Chrome. The future...
75
76
77
Chrome Developer Tools: Back to Basics
It’s been an exciting past few months in the Google Chrome Developer Tools world as we keep adding new features, while polishing up existin...
78
Nokia’s Suicide Note
Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.
79
Google's "Chrome Frame" plugin for IE no longer requires admin rights
We released Google Chrome Frame in September 2009 to expand the reach of modern web technologies and help developers take advantage of HTML...
80
81
Quotes from 1995 Steve Jobs Interview
I had the pleasure of catching the opening night showing of Robert X. Cringely's rediscovered TV interview with Steve Jobs in 1995. In the interview Steve mused...
82
83
84
What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?
On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An unemployed university graduate, Bouazizi had become a seller of fruits and vegetables in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When authorities confiscated his wares to punish him for selling without a license…
85
How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for size of a…
86
87
Urban Decay: Exploring an old abandoned particle collider facility
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
88
jwz: Apple recently broke Ctrl-Y
Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…
89
Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
90
Why linux doesn't have a "wheel" group
The wheel group is, perhaps, not widely used today, or is seen as “archaic” and irrelevant. Nothing could be further from the truth. The wheel group is a group which limits the number o…