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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 216 posts.
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
As we saw in my previous article , Jeff Tunnell walked away from Dynamix’s experiments with “interactive movies” feeling rather disillusioned by the whole concept. How ironic, then, that in at least one sense comparisons with Hollywood continued to ring true even after he thought he’d consigned such things to his…
Move over, Sennheiser. Make yourself scarce, Bose. Here comes the ultimate Hi-Fi solution for your living room: The Commodore 64! I s it sa...
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
In a stuffed apartment filled with hydrofluoric acid, oscilloscopes and a transistor curve tracer, Jeri Ellsworth carefully places a hand-cut silicon wafer into a 1000 degree furnace. The ambient noise of police sirens can be heard in the background: "Ugh, the police are coming... So the instructions for the…
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
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I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before.
This generated a lot of lively discussion on twitter and /r/c64 . A bunch of people were curious as to how it works and I promised to explain it on my blog.
The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than…
A few weeks ago I (=Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick) gave a keynote at ICOOOLPS in Amsterdam with the above title. I was very happy to have bee...
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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TL;DR: what I learned about the Bomb Jack arcade machine while writingan emulator for it.
Recently I was fortunate enough to chat with Chris Bacon who wrote DotNetAnywhere (an alternative .NET Runtime) and I quipped with him:
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
