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Wired Love: a novel from 1880 that could have been written last week
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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The keys to the keydom
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
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Why is my TI-99/4A in Black and White?
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Longtime readers may remember a previous article where we implemented TI-99/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language for modern computers. Recently I got nostalgic for the actual hardware so I got my 99 out of the closet where it had been for a decade o…
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When Einstein Met Tagore
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
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Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
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Aaron Swartz's Legacy
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
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Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
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The Evolution of Direct3D
alexstjohn.com is your first and best source for information about alexstjohn. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
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The Z-80 has a 4-bit ALU. Here's how it works.
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
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The largest computer ever built
While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in physica…
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The History of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” Album Art
I had no intention of ever learning this much about Joy Division or pulsars, but because of my apt to be a law abiding citizen, I was forced to research the about the ubiquitous design made popular by the British band and artist Peter Saville for a t-shirt project I’m heading on SixPrizes. In short, […]
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What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
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Matt Groening's Artwork for Apple
The story that The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening once illustrated a brochure for Apple back in 1989 has been making the rounds of the internet for a while now. However, in addition to that brochure, Groening did other artwork for Apple around that same time period. For anyone unfamiliar, Apple hired Groening to…
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Of Wizards and Magical Machines (2012)
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news…
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Why didn't we patent the spreadsheet? Were we stupid? (1999)
We didn't patent VisiCalc at Software Arts because you really couldn't patent software prior to 1981, and VisiCalc was shown to the public in 1979.
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Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...