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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports , I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
Douglas Bader was a Battle of Britain pilot unlike any other. Medically discharged against his will in 1932, the outbreak of the war was an opportunity for Bader to re-join the RAF and take back to the skies.
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that t…
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This is the first half of the fourth part of our four part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at the production …
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading…
How many transistors are in Intel's 8086 processor? This seems like a straightforward question, but it doesn't have a straightforward answ...
4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk sys…
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
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…
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
This week brings sad news for our Duxbury Systems family. Our colleague, David Holladay, passed away in a hospital on Thursday, February 15th, following an accident at home that morning. David was a cancer survivor and valiantly battled multiple medical problems over his last five years.
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
Frank Lloyd Wright was an outspoken advocate for low-density cities without skyscrapers. With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the tower design pictured above came from Wright. It’s called The Illinois , and it was planned to be a mile (1,609 meters, or 5,280 feet) in height. That’s more than fou
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight ...
Freespin is a Commodore 1541 demo, released in 2021. It runs on the Commodore floppy drive. It is is the first demo on this device.
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016) explored AI and art for nearly 50 years before we saw the rising popularity of these new machine learning tools. In those five decades, Cohen worked on a single program called Aaron that involved teaching a robot to create drawings. Aaron’s education took a similar pa
After 40 years, the Atari 2600 masterpiece Tarzan has been unearthed.
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
The vinyl record is an analog medium. How can it be affected by the loudness war? So what’s the impact?
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
