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A History of .NET Runtimes
Recently I was fortunate enough to chat with Chris Bacon who wrote DotNetAnywhere (an alternative .NET Runtime) and I quipped with him:
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The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…
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The path that the decimal number system took from India to medieval Europe
In every day life we all do our calculations, whether for the taxman, our purchases, paying the household bills or in some academic discipline, using the place value decimal number system. It consi…
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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
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Usenet, authentication, and engineering: early design decisions for Usenet
A Twitter thread on trolls brought up mention of trolls on Usenet . The reason they were so hard to deal with, even then, has some lessons for today; besides, the history is interesting. (Aside: this is, I think, the first longish thing I’ve ever written about any of the early design decisions for Usenet. I should…
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Reflections on DOOM's Development
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for
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Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)
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Dostoyevsky's “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (2014)
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”
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Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…
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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
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The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
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How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
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Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic
As Atari’s best-selling arcade game of all time, Asteroids was literally a game changer. Released in December 1979, it was responsible for catapulting Atari into mainstream public consciousne…
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The Transistor, Part 3: Endless Reinvention
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
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Version Control Before Git with CVS
What it was like using version control before distributed repositories and commit graphs.
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Kottke.org is 20 years old today
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
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The Source History of Cat
A tour of the many historical implementations of the Unix cat utility.
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Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
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The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
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An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014)
We cycled the Swiss part of the Rhine Cycleway last week, with our folding bikes neatly stowed in suitcases for the flight. A combination of cycle.travel (natch), the Cicerone guide, and the excellent MapOut app guided us safely along the way: a very modern combination of mapping styles.
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Star Control II
In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the left. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the right.
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The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
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Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…