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17 votes
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AIM was the killer app of 1997. It’s still shaping the internet today.
16 votes -
The lie that helped build Nintendo
9 votes -
The curious case of the US Government’s influence on 20th-century design
9 votes -
The story of Freedom Ship
2 votes -
Roman Castra - How legionaries built and lived in their fortresses
3 votes -
Lovers in Auschwitz, reunited seventy-two years later. He had one question
7 votes -
Merriam-Webster's Time Traveler: Words by year of appearance
6 votes -
PlayStation: The first twenty-five years - An oral history of Sony’s big gaming play, and how it changed the world
6 votes -
Lost piece of gaming history uncovered
4 votes -
The rise and fall of the PlayStation supercomputers: One PlayStation can play a game, but 100 PlayStations can peer into the secrets of the universe
10 votes -
From Stevie Wonder to 'Mother Earth's Plantasia,' music for plants is real
4 votes -
The Therac-25: Thirty years later
8 votes -
The intoxicating history of gin
6 votes -
Gary Kildall: The man who could have been Bill Gates
6 votes -
How a meteorite ruined an Alabama woman's afternoon sixty-five years ago
9 votes -
Finland marks 80th anniversary of brutal conflict with the Soviet Union
3 votes -
A brief history of the crock pot
7 votes -
The Art of the Foundry
3 votes -
How fungi made all life on land possible
9 votes -
New Tricks For An Old Z-Machine, Part 3: A Renaissance Is Nigh
From the article: For all that Curses entranced me, however, I never came close to completing it. At some point I’d get bogged down by its combinatorial explosion of puzzles and places, by its...
From the article:
For all that Curses entranced me, however, I never came close to completing it. At some point I’d get bogged down by its combinatorial explosion of puzzles and places, by its long chains of dependencies where a single missed or misplaced link would lock me out of victory without my realizing it, and I’d drift away to something else. Eventually, I just stopped coming back altogether.
I was therefore curious and maybe even slightly trepiditious to revisit Curses for this article some two decades after I last attempted to play it. How would it hold up? The answer is, better than I feared but somewhat worse than I might have hoped.
[...]
[Curses] was designed, like his beloved Crowther and Woods Adventure, to be a place which you came back to again and again, exploring new nooks and crannies as the fancy took you. If you actually wanted to solve the thing… well, you’d probably need to get yourself a group for that.
[...]
All of which is to say that, even as it heralded a new era in interactive fiction which would prove every bit as exciting as what had come before, Curses became the last great public world implemented as a single-player text adventure.
5 votes -
Slaying the speckled monster - The history of smallpox and the origins of vaccines
6 votes -
The untold story of Alien Ant Farm’s ‘Smooth Criminal’
7 votes -
The rise of 'facadism' in London
13 votes -
The golden age of the internet is over
6 votes -
Space-grade CPUs: How do you send more computing power into space?
8 votes -
Swedish maritime archaeologists have discovered two wrecks believed to be 17th-century warships – one of which is likely to be the sister ship of the Vasa
5 votes -
How a cargo ship helped win WW2: The Liberty Ship story
4 votes -
Why you wouldn't want to fly on the Soviet concorde - The TU-144 story
8 votes -
The extraordinary story of Joy Whitehead - female soldier of the first world war
8 votes -
How did the US Navy win the Battle of Midway?
5 votes -
The world’s oldest-known recipes decoded
9 votes -
Remember, remember, the fifth of November, Gunpowder Treason and Plot...
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. Today is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night, where we commemorate the 1605 plot by Guy Fawkes and a group of English Catholics who...
I see no reason why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot.
Today is Bonfire Night or Guy Fawkes night, where we commemorate the 1605 plot by Guy Fawkes and a group of English Catholics who planned on blowing up Parliament and King James I to set off a popular revolt and putting a Catholic Monarch on the throne.. We do that by burning an effigy of Guy Fawkes on a bonfire, eating black peas, treacle and parkin and terrorising pets everywhere by setting off fireworks.
Unfortunately because of its proximity to Halloween and silly things like "safety" many of the traditional celebrations are dying out. Kids used to essentially beg for money by stuffing clothing and asking for "a penny for the Guy" which they'd use for sweets or fireworks. Locally made bonfires are also becoming rarer with most these days done by professional and regulated firework companies and organised by the council so it feels more like watching a show and less like getting together with your neighbours and family.
Are you going to any events, hosting one, do you have any stories or questions about Bonfire night, do you have any traditions. Thoughts on fire works etc.
Just a general Bonfire Night thread.
18 votes -
First Contact (Internet at 50yrs old) - Dr Julian Onions recalls working to bring the Internet to Nottingham
4 votes -
How Britain dishonoured its African first world war dead
7 votes -
The story of the team behind the 6502
4 votes -
The frightening history of Halloween haunted houses
4 votes -
On October 24, 1975 over ninety percent of Icelandic women refused to work – to show how much society depended on women's labor, from farms and factories to the home
10 votes -
How to live like Jane Austen
4 votes -
A piece of kitchen art sold for $26 million. A long-lost painting by Italian pre-Renaissance artist Cimabue had been hanging above a stove in an elderly French woman’s home.
10 votes -
The evolution of urban planning in ten diagrams
12 votes -
Killing time during the Trojan War with Ajax and Achilles
4 votes -
Book Review: French Tanks of the Great War
3 votes -
Digging up Woodstock: An archaeological investigation of the famous festival site unearthed evidence hidden in the haze of memory
7 votes -
How skeletons of WWI ships came to rest in the Potomac
4 votes -
Medieval Fighting Techniques - Mounted vs Foot (Lance vs Polearm & Sword)
4 votes -
Martyr of Verdun: Émile Driant's Command Post
6 votes -
The not-com bubble is popping—The unicorn massacre unfolding today is exactly the opposite of what happened in 2000
22 votes -
The Internet and the Third Estate
5 votes -
'The perfect combination of art and science': Mourning the end of paper maps
18 votes