Retro
The Return of the UNIX Workstation (Now With AI)
I was a heavy UNIX user throughout the 1990s, back when powerful RISC UNIX workstations roamed the Earth. SGI Octanes, Sun Ultras, DEC Alphastations... all absurdly expensive and built for science, engineering, and development work. And the new NVIDIA GB10 feels like the first true successor to those systems that I’ve used in over 25 years.
Demonstrating the Power of Apple Silicon using Actuated CI
Recently, I had the opportunity to help test the Actuated CI platform on my Mac Studio M1 Max running Linux. The results were impressive.
Janet Jackson's Denial of Service (DoS) Attack
Janet Jackson might not be the first person who comes to mind when you think of a hacker. But she inadvertently created a malicious payload that performed a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.
How an Ancient PowerBook Captured a Summer Vacation
Sometimes, the past doesn't come flooding back with a photograph or a song, but instead with the whir of an ancient hard drive and the glow of a tiny monochrome screen.
RISCy business: The long and convoluted rise of today's dominant computing platform
In the 1980s, RISC was the future. By the early 2000s, it was the past. And now it's the future again.
Ontario's Computer Part 2: The LEXICON Server
In this follow-on to my previous blog post, I'll examine the brains behind the Burroughs ICON computer: the LEXICON server that all ICONs connected to across an ARCNET network.
Ontario's Computer: The Burroughs ICON
Back in 1984, the Ontario government made their own computer for the school system, but ordered school boards to send them all to landfill a decade later. In this post, you'll explore one that survived and learn why it was cool.
SPARCbook teardown
In a 2019 blog post, I explored a SPARC-based laptop from the 1990s running Solaris UNIX. In this post, I run through a teardown of the laptop to explore its hardware design.
The old Web was fun
I was around during the birth of the web in the early 1990s. In this post, I'll tell you why the web was much more fun back then.
2019 in review
Each December, I like to take some time to reflect on the events of the year - and this year was AWESOME!