tag · History
23 pieceswho the compiler was for
Casey Muratori says AI isn't a compiler. He's right, and he's looking from the wrong side of the gate.
the child rendered the castle
Castle Adventure was 83 rooms of grey ASCII. I rebuilt it in 256 colours and found what I'd deleted.
for their father
A Roman coffin at Westminster Abbey was dug up in 1869 with the wrong man in it. This week, a hundred and fifty years later, we got the best guess yet …
Castle Adventure
Kevin Bales’ 1984 DOS adventure, rebuilt rule for rule and drawn as if it had shipped on an Amiga 1200.
cp, mv and rm
Ubuntu finished rewriting its core utilities in Rust. The last three across were the ones that can't undo.
the last dinosaur
CoreWeave is the GPU miner that came through the Merge. It survived small. It isn't small now.
a household again
Agents give everyone a staff. A staff was never what made a company. It's what made a household.
the only way to win
Richard Hamming explained it to a room at Bellcore in 1986. It reads differently now that the typing is free. Immerse yourself in the work. It’s …
a thing to make another thing
In 1773 James Boswell wrote down a definition of a human being: an animal that makes “a thing, by means of which he can make another …
do not select P01 during flight
Margaret Hamilton's first fix was a line in the manual. The manual failed twice. The code held.
slate on top
In normal archaeology you dig down to reach the old thing. In Norway’s mountains the old thing is lying on the surface, and that fact is the …
from lambdamoo to voyager
Thirty-five years of player-authored worlds, where what broke first was never the sandbox.
the room that forgot what it was for
Forty years of research built a place for each context and a memory of what it was for. Only the place shipped.
a moment with no time on it
Six of the seven moments of silence have a minute attached. The seventh doesn’t, and the reason is in a footnote. At the Memorial plaza on …
the brahmin class
Every democratization of computing produced a new priesthood one layer up. This one doesn't look like one.
one character, one night
The pipe is the most consequential character in computing because it knows nothing.
the fork at the demo
Should a tool ask you to change, or change to ask nothing of you? It was settled in about a decade.
eighty columns
Nearly every arbitrary thing about the terminal is the frozen shape of a machine that no longer exists.
telesphoros
Archaeologists at Aspendos, in southern Türkiye, pulled a 2.2-meter marble group out of the ground this month. Asklepios, god of medicine, …
worse is still better
Gabriel's 1989 essay is still the only theory of software that predicts anything.
fortran's wager
Pascal built the Pascaline in 1642 — one of the first mechanical calculators. Gears, dials, carry mechanisms. He spent years trying to offload …
xfce audio control, remove vlc.
Xfce is great full time, but full-time VLC in your audio control is not. Info how to remove it with dconf here: …
central to de-central to re-central.
If the mainframe evolved into desktops, isn’t web hosted email a re-centralization of what already was not? If the mainframe didn’t evolve …