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Wil Shipley: My “Doom” 20th Anniversary Stories
The way I got into the software business (besides learning to code) was to use every piece of software I could find and send the developers ...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 143 posts.
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Ethiopian Binary Math
Today, a witch doctor practices computer arithmetic. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The scene is a remote Ethiopian village in 1940. A Farmer offers his herd of 34 goats for sale…
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The Deep Insights of Alan Kay
If you haven’t heard of Alan Kay you’ll likley have heard one of his many famous quotes, the most popular, likely his 1971 gem: The best …
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How Blender started, twenty years ago
Celebrating 20 years of Blender code!
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The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
The PNG image file format has been created in 1995 as a response to some patent issues around the then-prevailing GIF format. PNG has gained popularity ever since, and it is now used on more websites than GIF.
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Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those…
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First actual computer bug was found today, 66 years ago
On the 9th September, 1947, operators of the Mark II Aiken Relay Computer being tested at Harvard University, found a bug. And, in so doing, made history.
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The forbidden railway: Vienna - Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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Turning the Apple //e into a lisp machine, part 1
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
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The 6502 CPU's overflow flag explained at the silicon level
In this article, I show how overflow is computed in the 6502 microprocessor at the transistor and silicon level. I've discussed the mathema...
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Apple Core Rot: Introduction
This is the first page only. Use the popup menu at top right for subsequent pages.
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North Korea 2013 – A travel journal
In summer 2013 I traveled to the most isolated country in the world. I've experienced expected and unexpected things. This is my illustrated travel journal.
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Message threading (1997-2002)
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
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MIT Legal repudiated Xbox hacker too
I am joining three academic research web sites, SIFT and Polyphen (websites for predicting disease mutations) and CRAVAT (a website for predicting cancer mutations), in a moment of silence to mark Aaron Swartz’ passing. On January 25, we will bring down our sites for the day to honor his contributions and mark the…
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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Building Photoshop 1.0
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
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Wired Love: a novel from 1880 that could have been written last week
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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F-1 Engine Recovery
Thanks to the conservation team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Apollo F-1 artifacts are ready for display. A few weeks ago the first shipment of artifacts arrived at The Museum of Flight here in Seattle, and I joined museum president Doug King, adjunct curator for space history Geoff Nunn, and…
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The keys to the keydom
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
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