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For the Colonel, It Was Finger-Lickin’ Bad (1976)
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhatta
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An Illustrated Guide to Maritime Signal Flags
Rabbit Waves
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They don't make 'em like that any more: the 3.5mm headphone jack socket
What’s the real reason that cellphone manufacturers stopped fitting this simple, robust connector?
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Owe your banker £1k you are at his mercy; owe him £1m the position is reversed (2019)
Question for Quote Investigator: The relationship between bankers and borrowers is symbiotic and occasionally counter-intuitive. Here is a pertinent adage:
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What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
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The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
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Is stuff online worth saving?
I’ll admit, the question took me back a bit. But I’d say yes, it is.
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Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa.
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Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today
I'm very interested in the history of Dungeons & Dragons , but I'm not a historian – especially when compared to someone like Jon Peterson. ...
160
Eating the Birds of America: Audubon's Culinary Reviews of America's Birds
On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to…
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The Myth of Bananaland
The marketing and reality of the United Fruit Company
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The purge of German science in 1933
“If the dismissal of Jewish scientists means the annihilation of contemporary German science, then we shall do without science for a few years!” — Adolf Hilter
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Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
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Neo Geo Architecture: A practical analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The Heart of Unix (2018)
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
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The Invention of Zero
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”
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Building the Bell System
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top.
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Descent: A classic 3-D first-person shooter (2012)
DESCENT is a classic 3-D first-person shooter for DOS that was released in 1995, developed by Parallax Software and published by Interplay Productions. DESCENT is a contemporary of the other very popular FPS of the time, DOOM by id Software, released just over a year before. However, it is not based on DOOM; the…
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The Star Destroyer and Imperial Military Doctrine
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024146 points40 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…
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Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook”
"IF FOUND--Please return to Paramount Pictures"
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How Miles Davis hired John Coltrane
A fascinating interlude from James Kaplan's new book '3 Shades of Blue'
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Atari Falcon030
Impressive, but too late to the party
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A History of Source Control Systems: SCCS and RCS
dsp's personal site
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How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
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After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
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Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
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Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build
The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.