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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 216 posts.
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The Art Institute of Chicago Has Put 50k High-Res Images Online
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
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How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language
A look at the fascinating history behind the one programming language with magical powers.
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Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
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Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
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History of the browser user-agent string (2008)
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
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The Game of Everything, Part 1: Making Civilization
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Where Vim Came From
Tracing the long lineage of software that brought us Vim.
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Hennessy and Patterson win Turing Award
Hennessy and Patterson pioneered a systematic, quantitative approach to the design and evaluation of computer architectures that has had enduring impact on the microprocessor industry. Their reduced instruction set computer (RISC) approach has led to lasting and repeatable principles that generations of architects…
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What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.
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C.S. Lewis on the Reading of Old Books
"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." - CS Lewis
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A Brief History of the BEAM Compiler
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
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For a brief period, the Windows kernel tried to deal with gamma rays
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Vladimir Lukyanov's hydraulic computer
A blog on landscape architecture and related fields
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What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
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Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition
With the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub complete, Nat Friedman joins as CEO.
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Worst Computer Bugs in History: Therac-25 (2017)
The Worst Computer Bugs in History is a mini series to commemorate the discovery of the first computer bug seventy years ago. Although these stories are more extreme than most software bugs engineers will encounter during their careers, they are worth studying for the insights they can offer into software development…
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CRPG Book Released
Four years ago I began a journey. On Feb 5 2014 I posted the results of the RPG Codex’s Top 70 poll, in which we elected the best CRPGs of all time. But I felt that a simple list was too dry&…
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1961 The books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth, the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after…