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A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 155 posts.
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
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Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
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When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
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The MS-DOS Showcase
2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…
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NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
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A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
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Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
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They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
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Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
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The Tomb of Queen Esther in Persia
“How much is the taxi to Khomeini Square?” “ Gheymati nadore, it does not cost anything”, the old taxi driver spreads his arms...
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The Visual ARM1
Today is the 25th anniversary of ARM Ltd., UK. To celebrate and honor their amazing work, we present the Visual ARM1 , created in collabo...
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19th Century Marriage Manuals: Advice for Young Husbands
Published in 1837, The Young Husband’s Book is described as a “manual of domestic duties.”
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Sleeping Through a Revolution
Letter to the Millenials 2
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Georgia: Why so many counties?
When the Romans came to Great Britain, they built a bunch of forts called castra, which was Anglicized to chester. So, English cities whose names end in -chester, -caster and -cester were once Roma…
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What will be the legacy of Go?
In October this year I had the privilege of speaking at the GothamGo conference in New York City. As I talk quite softly, and there were a few problems with the recording, I decided to write up my slide notes and present them here.
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Notes on Red Star OS 3.0
How to navigate North Korea's home-grown Linux distribution.
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8088 MPH: The final version
Although we were very happy with the win at Revision, we were not entirely happy with 8088 MPH as a whole. Because of the time pressure, there were some things we could not finish as well as we wan…
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