Viewing profile — drfuchs

Hey, DVI was my suggestion and initial implementation; Knuth's comments in the TeX source code acknowledge this, and they mention plenty more people than Frank Liang who made signi…

Also, Nixie Tubes were absolutely not “tiny.” Typically, they were about the same size as a vacuum tube you’d find in the back of your radio or TV. They were universally used on el…

Nope, that would be Michael Plass (thesis title: "Optimal pagination techniques for automatic typesetting systems," though his line-breaking work is what showed up in TeX) and Fran…

Earlier additional great info from svat (and ramblings by me) are at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20006525 One point concerning Metafont and Computer Modern (and TeX): A ke…

Not so about the Linotype. Back in 1980, I personally ran the Alphatype CRS phototypesetter (bought by DEK for the purpose), in the basement of Margaret Jacks Hall, that produced t…

Kind of astonishing that they managed to retain the institutional / folk knowledge to be able to create a new vacuum tube product, never mind the machinery and inputs to manufactur…

I did some assembly programming on the Fairchild F8 mentioned in the prequel article. Quaintest feature: Doing a “long” jump (more than 127 bytes away) would cause the accumulator …

Burbank Airport used to get recognizable celebrities to record the canned public announcements in their own style. I seem to recall Joan Rivers, Henny Youngman, Jerry Seinfeld, etc…

Relatedly, there's a steganographic opportunity to hide info in machine code by using "XOR rax,rax" for a "zero" and "SUB rax,rax" for a "one" in your executable. Shouldn't be too …

Also https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/02/joe-halpern-towerin...

From who now?

Can they re-raise it in Series Rust?

But they left S, X, and Z rotationally symmetric, so if you choose a non-palindrome vanity plate with only those characters, you can mount it upside-down and fool plate-readers.

Well, ackchyually, the first releases of FrameMaker were created on Sun 3/50 workstations with 4MB of (unexpandable, soldered-in) RAM on a 16Mhz 68020. Most customers had the same …

Colossus: The Forbin Project is simply a renamed release of The Forbin Project, a few months after the later had a poor opening. Didn’t help the box office much. I liked it, back w…

Waymo halted service in San Francisco as of Saturday at 8 p.m., following a power outage that left approximately 30% of the city without power. The autonomous cars have been causin…

It still says "44 characters" when I click the link.

Oops. Anyway, I remember attending a talk by one of the IBM engineers back when they first released the XT/370. He said that they looked at all possible ways to integrate their pro…

Any chance it was for the "IBM Personal Computer AT/370" that nobody remembers (perhaps because nobody used)?

Yeah, and I suppose you’re going to tell me that Han didn’t shoot first, either. Did you refer to an original 1980 70mm release print, before all the fiddling around they did on su…

The high sale price was due to the fact that this was a rare "REVENGE of the Jedi" rather than the normal "RETURN of the Jedi" poster. The back-story is that the movie title was or…

Indeed. Take a gander at the last screenful of ziglang.org

Real programmers would have donated $524,288. But seriously good news nonetheless.

That’s a ZipCode.