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A bit of XENIX history (2014)
Retrocomputing and other indulgences
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Unusual Locomotives
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
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Reverse-engineering an unusual IBM modem board from 1965
The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out t...
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Interview with Frank Herbert and His Wife Beverly Herbert (1969)
INTERVIEW BETWEEN: ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� DATE OF TAPE:
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The Dig
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
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PiDP-11 – Recreating PDP-11/70 with Raspberry Pi
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
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My first Z80 assembly language program
I was 9 years old. A revision of the notebook containing my first Z80 assembly language program
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8 Bits of history: My first game is still available on the internet
Smackeyackys excellent adventure I was somewhere around eight or nine when the 8 bit era of personal computers started getting into action....
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Project Deluge: Xbox and Dreamcast
Project Deluge (Lot Page) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (List) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (Matched List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (Matched List) Discuss this release on our Discord server!
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Hypertext Tools from the 80s
The pre-internet era was full of wonderful and very powerful systems that are well forgotten now, but we definitely can learn from them, try to understand why we had an enormous degradation in the 1990s and 2000s, and why we are enjoying hypertext systems renaissance now.
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“Raiders of the Lost Ark” Story Conference Transcript (1978)
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
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An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
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Programming War Stories: macOS Freeware/Shareware (2019)
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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When you have too much memory for SheepShaver
When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill. While Be only off...
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
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Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
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Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
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1980: MUD
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
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Hawking Hawking
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
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Well-behaved bubbles often make history
The right kind of bubble brings together the right group of people at the right time — it's a coordinating mechanism that can do a surprising amount of good.
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How Not to Redact a Warhead
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
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Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
Implementing an 8080 emulator in a microservice architecture on top of kubernetes
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Coaxial Goes to War
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .