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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 182 posts.
In his 2004 book Perilous Times , Geoffrey R. Stone observes that with respect to free speech rights in wartime, “Time and again, Americans have suppressed dissent, imprisoned and deported dissenters, and then—later—regretted their actions.” In reality, as the timeline below demonstrates, it is not simply American’s…
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
Last night I went to see a showing at the Tribeca Film Festival of the new movie about Ramanujan, The Man Who Knew Infinity. It was extremely good, infinitely better than the most recent high profi…
A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried…
It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry , the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years…
Updated February 2, 2016: Once you learn about our team and who we are, come take a trip down memory lane with us! Yesterday morning, the Hosted UI team, responsible for VMware’s Workstation …
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Wherein the author discusses (another) accident of history.
What do a recent A List Apart article , the ad blocker discussion of a few months back, and my browser testing plans have in common?
The Nobel Peace Prize 2016 was awarded to Juan Manuel Santos "for his resolute efforts to bring the country's more than 50-year-long civil war to an end"
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
Where did the common image of the socially-awkward, white, male programmer come from?
Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that…
A tour of Silicon Valley
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked...
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
