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Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
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We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
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More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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My story on “worse is better” (2018)
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
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The origins of XXX as FIXME
In which I go digging into source archives from 40-50 years ago, to figure out why we use XXX to mark dodgy code.
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Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been
Why didn't the FOAF standard give us distributed social networking in the 2000s?
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Debian 8.7 released
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
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The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier
Over the past year or so, I’ve been loading up SyncTerm and logging in to various telnet-accessible BBSs here and there — nothing too consistent. But, thanks to a piece of kit released by Paul Rickards, over the past month … Continue reading →
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Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
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Mach 3.5 Over Libya in an SR-71 Blackbird
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking…
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How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
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A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities
This is big news, in the realm of game design studies. During the production of GET LAMP, I spent a lot of time digitizing or photographing all sorts of artifacts and documents related to Interacti…
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Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
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In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
In Search of 2.11BSD, as released Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BS...
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J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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This One Hurts: Dr. Walter Bortz on Dr. John McCarthy
John McCarthy died four days ago. He was 84. His obit in the “New York Times” made specific reference to his generally attributed parenthood of artificial intelligence. John was my good…
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The evolution of Unix architecture in two diagrams
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
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Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
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Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
As we near the end of this decade, and more importantly the end of the hell that was 2020, I realised two things. First, I survived catching Covid-19, and secondly that I had a good story about the…
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Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)
LISP-NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE-1980
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Your First THINK C Program
Welcome, child! Come in, come in! I have so few visitors to this little hut. Pull up a chair, and I’ll put on some tea.
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Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Graphics for Professionals
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