The interview with John Bridges, a pioneering software engineer, delves into his early experiences with computers, the development of PCPaint, and his contributions to multimedia software like GRASP and GL Pro. Bridges discusses h...
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The article discusses a new online tool designed to assist players of Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in selecting Beast forms for druids using the Wild Shape ability and for casters using the Polymorph spell. It highlights the complexit...
The article discusses the development and implementation of EMISARI, a software system created by the Office of Emergency Preparedness (OEP) during President Nixon's 1971 Wage-Price Freeze. It details the software's design, its ro...
The post chronicles the creation and legacy of the educational game OREGON, which evolved into The Oregon Trail, emphasizing its innovative design and educational impact.
Desmond MacHale’s biography of George Boole offers a comprehensive look at his life, contributions to mathematics, and personal relationships, though it lacks explicit connections to digital systems.
The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers: From Fast Machines to Fast Codes is a technical and business history of the roughly three-decades when Seymour Cray dominated the development of supercomputers. It covers the major supercomp...
The text discusses the challenges of finding digital maps for tabletop role-playing games in a growing marketplace. It suggests using computer vision technology to extract product data and augment product discovery tools and datab...
Connect Four is a solved game in the m,n,k family, with a dataset of all valid eight ply positions and their win results. The game has been solved both weakly and strongly. The dataset consists of 2,031,148 data rows and one heade...
The text is a review of Mark Priestley's book 'Routines of Substitution: John von Neumann’s Work on Software Development, 1945-1948'. It discusses von Neumann's influence on computing design, his work on the EDVAC project, and the...
0Ludii Wumpus World
2025-03-26 • game development kaggle ludii wumpus world
Ludii is a general game system for modeling games and puzzles, and it was recently used to provide the training data for a Kaggle competition. The system contains a version of Wumpus World, a common puzzle used for AI training and...
MacPaint is a monochromatic raster image painting program that was one of the two launch applications for the Apple Macintosh in 1984. The article examines the design and implementation of the application using the source code. It...
0Programming Lewis Carroll's *Memoria Technica*
2024-12-26 •
Charles Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carroll, developed a cipher to help him remember numbers by embedding them in couplets or phrases. The cipher encodes plaintext’s of sequences of digits. Carroll provides example couplets for e...
The text discusses the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to categorize and translate historical software corpora, focusing on the FLOW-MATIC programming language. It examines the performance of LLMs in explaining and translating...
0Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI (Review)
2024-11-15 •
Chatbots Decoded: Exploring AI is a new exhibit from the Computer History Museum (CHM) covering the history of chatbots and conversational interfaces, as well as the social ramifications of the technology. The exhibit features the...
0Mathematical Analysis of the Royal Game of Ur
2024-10-29 •
The paper presents a mathematical analysis of the Royal Game of Ur, deducing its complexity and comparing it to other popular games. It uses combinatorics and probability to understand the game's patterns, winning moves, and strat...
0A New Look
2024-10-28 •
The author has changed the theme of the blog from Noteworthy to Long Form, primarily to improve printing support and table formatting. The previous theme was no longer supported or updated, and the author is considering adopting a...
0About
2024-10-28 •
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0Exposure to Art: a MTA Case Study
2024-10-14 •
The text discusses the allocation of budget towards public artwork by corporations and agencies, focusing on New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). It evaluates the effectiveness of the program by measuring the ex...
0PostScript® 1.0 - A Code Study
2024-09-26 •
The text discusses the release of the source code for PostScript® 1.0 by Adobe in December 2022. It explores the historical questions that may be answered through the source code and what software practitioners can learn from it. ...
0ZLister Announcement
2024-08-23 •
ZLister is a new to-do list management application that allows users to create lists with entries, mark them complete or incomplete, and run offline. The motivation behind creating ZLister was to have a local-only, low maintenance...
0Study of Historical Code
2024-05-01 •
The text discusses the study of historical source code, outlining the objectives and questions to be asked. It compares the author's list of historical questions to Knuth's, and mentions the lack of studies on historical code. It ...
0Reserve Studies - A Policy Analysis
2024-04-16 •
The text discusses the importance of reserve studies for community associations to estimate their ability to fund maintenance costs for large projects. It describes the methodology, standards, and legal requirements for reserve st...
0How User Groups Made Software Reuse a Reality
2024-02-27 •
The text discusses the history of software reuse before the existence of software repositories. It explains how user groups coordinated development and shared code, and how they promoted discoverability of software. It also covers...
0Method of Differences Add'l Applications
2024-02-21 •
The post discusses two additional applications of the Method of Differences: sequences to functions and strength reduction. It explains how to analyze sequences using the method and how strength reduction is used as a code optimiz...