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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 311 posts.
The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
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…
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
This article will focus on discussing why the ancient text editor 'ed' works the way it does.
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
Main Menu - click above Man, thermometer, one legged stool & vat of nitro 1870 . Alfred Nobel chose Ardeer, in Ayreshire, as the ...
Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became …
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
For many, Los Angeles embodies car-culture—and the suburban-style development, freeways, traffic jams, and pollution that go with it. But it didn’t have to be that way. Turns out, LA was never designed to be a car city.
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
Thirty five years ago I became an Amiga user. One of the first, actually. This is a meandering and reminiscent post of sorts, written to mark the Amiga’s 35th birthday and the 35 years I have known and loved the … Continue reading →
Acorn, BBC Micro and Retro Computer Code & Demos
I've been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling's excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I'd start screencasting some of my work.
