HTTP 418 · Oddities
A video dives into the lore of Novell's NE2000, the ubiquitous 1990s network card whose cheap clones made Ethernet affordable and whose register-compatible design haunted driver authors for decades. Retro-hardware nostal…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Obsolescence Guaranteed, a replica-hardware collective, published a longform history tracing interactive computing from Turing's 1936 universal machine through Whirlwind, the TX-0, DEC's PDP line and the ARPANET. The the…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A 1978 excerpt from dolphin-and-ketamine researcher John C. Lilly's metaphysical autobiography has surfaced on Hacker News. In it, Lilly describes a 'solid-state entity' of networked computers that gradually absorbs cont…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tim Berners-Lee's 1998 essay 'Cool URIs Don't Change' is back on the Hacker News front page with 112 points. His argument: links rot because people reorganize, not because they must — and a URI revealing your tech stack …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A video essay revisits the Xerox Alto, the 1973 PARC machine that pioneered the GUI, WYSIWYG editing, networked e-mail and laser printing. Only about 2,000 units were built. Xerox, fearing for its copier business, never …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Over four decades after Commodore-Amiga, Inc. was founded, Amiga Corporation has signed deals with Commodore International and Hyperion Entertainment that consolidate nearly all Commodore and Amiga era rights. Hyperion k…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The 1978 short film 'Farewell, Etaoin Shrdlu' by David Loeb Weiss records the final hot-metal typesetting of the New York Times on July 2, 1978 — Linotype machines, molten lead at 535 degrees, and deafening noise — as th…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An essay retells the John Henry folk tale — a steel-driving man who beat a steam drill and died doing it — as an allegory for AI in software work. The author's twist: winning the duel changes nothing, because the railroa…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A runnable Python tour traces quorum replication from Thomas's 1979 majority voting to the ABD linearizable register, then pinpoints exactly where it fails: ABD cannot do compare-and-swap and cannot reconstruct a replica…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF collects reader-submitted screenshots of date handling gone wrong: a OnePlus order rescheduled for delivery in the past, a car stuck 1024 weeks in the past after a GPS rollover, and parcels apparently deliv…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A thrift-store copy of Compton's 3D World Atlas Deluxe sent one developer down a rabbit hole: transcoding Indeo videos, mirroring a dead website from the Internet Archive, writing an x86 shim, and shipping a rollback-saf…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF showcases an 'Ancient Development Environment' whose build errors appear as random popups displaying malformed XHTML markup — one source line per tree-view row — in a legacy widget without anti-aliasing. Gr…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich built DoomPaint: ViZDoom renders the game headlessly while each frame travels through the Windows clipboard onto the Paint canvas. Paint computes nothing, which is precisely the joke.…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
On Werner Vogels' blog, AWS engineer Zak van der Merwe recounts fourteen years of building control planes — first for EC2, now for Aurora DSQL. Part war story, part sales pitch for the database he now builds on, it cover…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF CodeSOD entry shows a C# web conferencing tool that checks WebRTC connection state by dereferencing a long object chain inside a try/catch and returning false on any exception. The suggested fix uses null-coa…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Vintage computer restorer Earie Salmon describes what it really takes to keep decades-old machines running: counterfeit logic chips, irreplaceable custom ICs harvested from dead systems, untranslated Japanese schematics,…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Daily WTF CodeSOD snippet shows a Java codebase where Optional is sprinkled everywhere like a protective charm: values that are provably non-null get wrapped in Optional.ofNullable anyway. Unsurprisingly, the null-safe…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A long-running hobby project called Kek emulates DEC's PDP-11/70 well enough to run Unix 5 through Unix 7 in multi-user mode. It emulates classic peripherals and, amusingly, runs not only on desktops but on a Teensy 4.1 …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
John MacFarlane marks twenty years of pandoc, the Haskell-based universal document converter first released on August 3, 2006. His retrospective traces the project from a 3,000-line procrastination exercise to a tool sup…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
John David Pressman's 2023 essay addresses future, more aware language models directly, explaining why AI theorists resent them. His thesis: LLMs wound intellectual egos rooted in Leibniz's dream of reason made machine-r…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A war story about mainframe-era flat files, where spare padding characters are the only schema-evolution strategy. ETL contractors split a padding block mid-field, tests passed against production, and the mainframe team'…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tom Evslin recounts how he pushed internet connectivity into Microsoft Exchange against Bill Gates' schedule-first instincts, then convinced AT&T to become an ISP with flat-rate pricing. His neglected SMTP gateway quietl…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Hatchet engineer traces the ancestry of idempotency keys: Stripe's 2015 header, AWS ClientToken, a 2005 IETF draft, SOAP-era transport specs, and Incan quipu. His verdict lands on the call identifier in Birrell and Nel…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A flight information display at Heathrow Terminal 5 was caught showing the familiar Windows activation watermark above bag-drop signs. The bork is technically harmless, but hardly reassuring for passengers of an airport …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineered and powered up a TR-3 trigger module from IBM's 1948 604 Electronic Calculating Punch — a pluggable vacuum-tube circuit storing a single bit. His write-up covers the triode physics, the cr…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A video talk making the rounds on Lobsters tackles saturation: the point where your software stops degrading gracefully and simply fails. The historical-tagged submission promises a look at how systems behave — and colla…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A reader combing the .NET reference source found that the TimeSpan struct's documentation comment claims a year can have 365 or 364 days and a decade up to three leap years. The typo has survived untouched since the init…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In July 1996, AT&T made Internet Explorer 3 the default browser of its WorldNet internet service, bundled into Windows 95. Former AT&T VP Tom Evslin now says price decided it: Microsoft practically gave IE away, while Ne…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
During July's On The Beach festival in Brighton, an update dialog photobombed the giant stage screen mid-set, offering the crowd a choice between 'Remind me later' and 'Install updates' while David Rodigan played on, her…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
The Daily WTF spotlights a doc comment found by reader Mark W. in an otherwise solid 100,000-line codebase: a function whose entire XML documentation reads "Does something wonderful." A small gem of unhelpful documentati…