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Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
Imagining a childhood encounter with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
Oldest registered domain names in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains
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Why the Luddites Matter
Chant no more your old rhymes about bold Robin Hood, His feats I but little admire I will sing the achievements of General Ludd Now the Hero of Nottinghamshire – General Ludd’s Triumph, [1] C…
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The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS
An unabridged history of RSS' triumphs and failures.
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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
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The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
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“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
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Computer science as a lost art (2015)
An old friend of mine asked me this in email last night...
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Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
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Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change
Nikon losing the leadership position to Canon in the market for professional photography 30 year technology transition story.
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Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…
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This Old Lisp
This is the keynote talk that I gave at the 2018 European Lisp Symposium in Marbella, Spain.
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Riving, a Viking-age woodworking technique
Viking-age smiths used the process known as riving to reduce a tree trunk to planks or to other useful articles. Rather than sawing the wood, they split it. As a result, the grain of the wood follows the piece being fabricated, creating a much stronger item than if it had been sawn. It's one of several reasons why…
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Wing Commander II
If there was ever any doubt inside Origin Systems that Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander was destined to join Ultima as the company’s second great franchise, it was banished the moment the first game in the new series was released on September 26, 1990, and promptly sold by some accounts 100,000 copies in its first month…
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Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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Debian 9.4 released
[10 Nov 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.6 released [05 Aug 2018] DebConf18 closes in Hsinchu and DebConf19 dates announced [14 Jul 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.5 released [23 Jun 2018] Updated Debian 8: 8.11 released [01 Jun 2018] Debian 7 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [10 Mar 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.4 released
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Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
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A study of musical scales (2017)
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
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Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES
The Super Nintendo classic started life on the 8-bit NES. That version was considered lost...until now.
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A Brief History of High Availability
The perennial question of homo sapiens is, 'How did we get here?' Today we're going to take a crack at answering that: where 'here' is defined as 'high availability for web services'.
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The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story
Ault and Wiborg’s art nouveau poster ads.
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How 4000 Physicists Gave a Vegas Casino Its Worst Week (2015)
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society