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Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
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Eton and all the murder (2019)
As recent politics illustrates, Eton has a reputation for producing pupils who achieve high office, but who are not sufficiently competent to hold high office. One thing that is rarely mentioned, however, is all the murder.
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The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points.
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Margaret Mead, technocracy, and the origins of AI's ideological divide
The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk
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My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia
I ended up going to a small museum run by a passionate enthusiast in the beautiful countryside of south-east Estonia while on vacation, here are my notes on it.
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Nintendo 64 Test Cart ROM
We were sent a Nintendo 64 test cartridge ROM that was dumped anonymously. Zoinkity wrote up a nice readme explaining the details which is included in the 7ZIP file we’ve uploaded to the Internet Archive for safekeeping. Download it by clicking here .
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Why did The Beatles get so many bad reviews?
An inquiry into how critics stumble
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All the hominins made tools
A study of associations between stone tool evidence and fossil hominin remains shows that a wide range of species made stone artifacts.
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How HyperCard got its color back
Uli’s blog on programming, game development, pop culture and other boring things.
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Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)
Do you know what got black currants banned? They nearly destroyed a huge part of American forests. Find out how this healthy berry became a threat.
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The Apple Network Server's all-too-secret weapon (featuring PPC Toolbox)
Most of my systems are microcomputers (and commensurately sized), though I do have some moderately larger beasts: you've met homer , my 1987...
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Ibn Battuta: A Scholar's Epic Journey (2018)
This morning I stumbled upon [a video](https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/films/title/ibn-battutas-search-for-knowledge) that mentions one of the famous traveler, Ibn Battuta. And the deeper I dig, the more fascinated I am by his journey. It is one thing to visit a place and buy merchandises before return to home…
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Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits
What did Vincent van Gogh look like? His self-portraits provide a good indication. Read on to find out all about them.
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How flip-flops are implemented in the Intel 8086 processor
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
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Historical maps probably helped cause World War I
On cartography as historical argument
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The History of Microsoft Encarta
Searchable Human Knowledge
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Early Days of AI
Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past "AI", it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s Self-Powered Cart (2021)
A club for Meccano enthusiasts in London, holding four meetings each year and a public Meccano Show in Falconwood.
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How to Roman Republic 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023145 points37 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the first of a planned five-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquit…
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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
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The short life of New York City’s first skyscraper
In 1889, a slender building was unveiled on a commercial stretch of Lower Broadway, snugly situated between two older structures. Rising 11 stories, it wasn’t the tallest tower in the city. N…
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Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...
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IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
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Modern TLS/SSL on 16-bit Windows
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
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Cistercian Numerals
Cistercian numerals were invented by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th century. Giuseppe Frisella explains how the notation system works: A vertical str
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