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On the Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674
“That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by th...
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Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
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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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History of Emacs and vi Keys (2010)
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
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“Peer review” is younger than we think
This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer review, a...
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"
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Origins of Python's “Functional” Features (2009)
I have never considered Python to be heavily influenced by functional languages, no matter what people say or think. I was much more familia...
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Stanford scholar gets six-figure settlement from James Joyce Estate (2009)
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
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The story of the Slovak national top-level domain
The top level domain of Slovakia is operated by a private company which abuses its monopoly. In the Central Europe it is something unusual.
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Inside the 74181 ALU chip
What's inside a TTL chip? To find out, I opened up a 74181 ALU chip, took high-resolution die photos, and reverse-engineered the chip. 1 In...
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Why doesn’t the clock in the taskbar display seconds? (2003)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Gambiarra: repair culture (2015)
Maker culture has gained a lot of ground in the last few years. Maybe too much, in fact. We can of course ignore those people who are only, as always, surfing the current wave of hype. They seldom have any clue of the ideas they are selling themselves with anyway. But it also feels as though everybody else is talking…
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Map showing the homeland of every character in Homer’s Iliad
This is a map showing where all of the characters originated in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad. I know Greece is small by today’s standards, but it was surprising
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Recompiling the Lost Vikings
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…
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OS/2 2.0, Summer ’91 Edition
In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missing for over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release (big thanks to a very helpful reader!).
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The Great Moon Hoax
On August 25, 1835 the <i>New York Sun</i> announced the discovery of life on the moon. It explained that the discovery had been made by the famous British astronomer Sir John Herschel, who had invented a new telescope of vast dimensions and an entirely new principle. Over the course of the next week the <i>Sun</i>…
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The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
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Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe
Students brewed an ancient beer during class with Stanford archaeologist Li Liu, who discovered evidence of earliest beer-making in China as part of her recent research.
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Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
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Minstrel ZX80 Clone
Here is a new ZX80 clone that I have called the Minstrel. It is a fairly accurate clone electrically to the ZX80, using the same chips and ...
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
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Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64
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VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
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Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source
Many reverse-engineered versions of “KERNAL”, the C64’s ROM operating system exist, and some of them even in a form that can be built into the original binary. But how about building the original C64 KERNAL source with the original tools?
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