2101
The Nokia N9 Alarm Clock (2014)
I want to talk about the Nokia N9 (2011) alarm clock application because it’s a really nice example of thoughtful, functional design – and because it’s only on the N9, so a lot of people won’t have seen it.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
2102
LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence does not cite prior work
1990: gradient descent learns subgoals. 1991: multiple time scales and levels of abstraction. 1997: world models learn predictable abstract representations...
2103
Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…
2104
Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
2105
Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3" TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.
2106
Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
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Thunderscan: A clever device transforms a printer into a scanner (2004)
The first project that I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low level software for the Silentype printer (see What Hath Woz Wrought ) , a cute, inexpensive thermal printer for the Apple II, that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion…
2109
Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum's Universal Robots (or…
2110
Archiving "The Famous Computer Cafe"
A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all. The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer…
2111
Baking Bread with the Romans: Part II – Panis Quadratus
Taste the daily life of Romans with this recipe for Panis Quadratus: The infamous sectioned bread excavated at Pompeii and preserved for millenia after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
2112
2113
So what’s wrong with 1975 programming? (2006)
Varnish is a powerful, flexible HTTP accelerator that speeds up web applications by caching content and optimizing delivery.
2114
Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster
2115
2,050-year-old Roman tomb offers insights on ancient concrete resilience
The unique mineral composition of the 2,050-year-old Roman tomb of Caecilia Metella could point the way toward more resilient and sustainable modern concrete structures.
2116
Unearthing a long-ignored African writing system
When BU’s Fallou Ngom found a note written by his late father, in a language that looked like Arabic but sounded like Wolof, it opened the door to a lifetime of discovery in African language and history.
2117
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
A blog about software craft and quality
2118
Goldeneye 64's inspirational startup story
GoldenEye 64 had a special place in my heart when I was growing up. It was the first game my parents wouldn’t let me buy due to violent content. I saved up allowances and dug up couch treasures for months to taste the forbidden fruit. The effort turned into one of the pillars of my childhood experiences. I still…
2119
Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2120
A 2x Faster Web
Today we'd like to share with the web community information about SPDY, pronounced "SPeeDY", an early-stage research project that is part of...
2121
The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
2122
A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
2123
The Flickr Foundation
Welcome to the new home of the Flickr Foundation! We are a new US 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to keeping the wonderful Flickr collection around for 100 years. Big goals, little steps.
2124
Apple Copland D11E4 Booting in the Browser
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
2125
MAME and the New Emulation Reality
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m …
2126
2127
Unix is not an acceptable Unix
The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?
2128
The strange story of etherpad
I don't actually know this story - certainly no more of it than anyone who has read a few web pages. But luckily, I'm pretty good at making...
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Apple Core Rot: Introduction
This is the first page only. Use the popup menu at top right for subsequent pages.