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How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
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Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
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Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
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John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
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Round Rects Are Everywhere
Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.
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I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student…
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COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
Delving the depths of computing, hoping not to get eaten by wumpus
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There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
For over thirty years, a dead rabbit has hung inside Seven Sisters tube station, and thousands of people walk past it every day without noticing.
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20 years of Google Scholar
Google Scholar celebrates two decades of breaking down barriers to academic research and making it accessible to everyone, everywhere.
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Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
I'm one of the founders at Corelatus. Our niche is telecom hardware for the E1/T1 and SDH/SONET interfaces. I work with layer 2 signalling, i.e SS7 MTP-2, ATM and frame relay, and the Erlang control system for our embedded hardware.
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Let's stop counting centuries
One-indexing problems in everyday life
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How SSH port became 22 (2017)
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
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The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor
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How the Devteam Conquered the iPhone
The summer of 2007 was an eventful one if you were into cell phones. It all started on June 29 when Apple announced the release of the iPhone. If you have never taken the time to watch the full keynote, I highly recommend it.
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Minuteman missile communications
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could…
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1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
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New Aztec Codices Discovered: The Codices of San Andrés Tetepilco
The recent announcement of the discovery of three new Aztec codices is covered here for the English-speaking public.
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300k airplanes in five years
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
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Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries
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On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
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It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
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Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
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Whence '\n'?
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
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They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
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What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.
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Alonzo Church: Architect of computer intelligence
The man who gave us the solution to the Entscheidungsproblem