(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit. 1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on main...
A blog about functional programming
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024130 points62 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
Programming blog of Eugene
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
The first mass market optical media
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods. You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard System...
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualiz…
A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024127 points106 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly k…
A famous blockprint by Hokusai titled “Mount Fuji Seen from the Mountains of Totomi,” showing a crew of sawyers rip-sawing a timber into boards using maebiki ooga saws, one man on top a…
There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident . They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and…
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
The first mechanical device used in Russia for computational purposes was the Russian abacus ( schoty ). This device became "the national calculator" and was used in cashier's offices down to the middle of the 90's. It is interesting to note that the textbook "Trade calculations" published in 1986 devotes a whole…
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
How A. W. Jones improvised his way to an investment style and structure that has persisted till today.
So I was working on improving a DOS emulator, when I found that something seemingly trivial wasn’t working right when COMMAND.COM was asked to do the following:
A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Porta...
Explore the intriguing history of Eliza, a pioneering chatbot, and learn how to implement a basic version in Go, unraveling the roots of conversational AI.
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
