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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 22 posts.
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The Diskette That Blew Trixter's Mind
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…
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How I hacked Digg
Two weeks ago I filed a bug report on Digg.com , explaining several XSS vulnerabilities and bugs I found. Some of these were (and some still are!) very critical. A day later, I got an automated response to my report:
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John Walker's Crisis Letter to Autodesk Employees (1983)
This letter marks the time when the change began, but the letter did not cause the change. The transformation of the company was wrought by numerous people, working long, largely uncompensated hours, at daunting and unfamiliar tasks, as the workload only piled higher. Progress could be measured only by realising in…
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About the origins of the equals sign
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz
Some folks have asked me what I know about Phil Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Phil Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I…
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Bill Gates on iTunes Store: another interesting memo
Link to: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/dayart/PDF/Gates/gatesmail15.pdf
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Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calculus classes
Continuing the theme of alternative approaches to teaching calculus, I take the liberty of posting a letter sent by Donald Knuth to to the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in March, 199…
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gorilla arm
The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very…
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the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism
In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…
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The Tao Of Programming
Last substantive modification 1996-04-10 or earlier; Kragen link updated 2016-11-30
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The Web’s the Place
I’ve been following some discussions about the future of software applications, and a phrase that came up in my dinner with Robb Beal has been echoing in my mind. What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a…
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Halloween Document 8
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
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The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
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wheel of reincarnation
[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors , Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward…