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A couple of messages about changes to ianVisits
I've been contacted a few times recently about the sharp decline in descriptive images on the events listings.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit. 1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on main...
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The Prolog Story (2010)
I’ve told this story in person dozens of times, it’s time to write it down and share it here. I’ve again experimentally recorded a video version (below), which you can view on a non-Flash device here .
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Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
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Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
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The fifty shades of Latin
In the bird’s-eye view, one might have the comforting illusion that country borders are also language borders. Especially where the bor...
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When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
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What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
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Teaching Apple Cyberdog 1.0 new tricks (featuring OpenDoc)
In the distant nethermists of time, documents once briefly ruled the earth (or at least Mac OS), and to that end I managed to find a verrr...
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Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth
DISCLAIMER: The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
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A vacuum tube ROM?
Is such a thing possible? Turns out it is, and it’s called a Monoscope. I recently got a Raytheon CK1414 Monoscope with a good getter and a working filament–naturally, I decided to fire…
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The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music.
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Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
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Nokia’s Suicide Note
Stephen Elop has jumped his company off the burning platform, all right. And, I judge, straight into the fire.
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Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
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If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)
Blaise Pascal? John Locke? Benjamin Franklin? Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac? Abraham Lincoln ? Henry David Thoreau? Cicero? Mark Twain? Woodrow Wilson?
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The digital ranging system that measured the distance to the Apollo spacecraft
During the Apollo missions to the Moon, a critical task for NASA was determining the spacecraft's position. To accomplish this, they devel...
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
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The Man Who Knew Infinity
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…
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ZX Spectrum Next Laptop
Having created a laptop style case for my ZX Spectrum Next dev board previously, I wanted to re-visit the idea of a Spectrum laptop and address some of the issues faced in the previous version.
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Forbidden Spheres
A document from 1947 points towards an interesting Los Alamos policy: banning all spheres, innocuous or not, from technical areas.
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Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
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A Peek into Einstein's Zurich Notebook
John D. Norton Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Pittsburgh This page at http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/Goodies
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Why the Black MacBook Cost More
From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook. The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook. The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and…
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CRT Manufacturing
Explore CRT lamp history at vintageTEK. View TekTalk and TekWeek articles, photos, and PDFs documenting CRT lamp and gun assembly production.
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Was Knuth Really Framed?
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
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