Accretion Disc Blog

Tag: history

  • I really like this picture:

  • Back to the Future Day

    Today is November 12. Sixty-seven years ago, at 10:04 pm, Saturday November 12, 1955, lightning struck the Hill Valley town clock tower. Bad for the tower, but good for Marty McFly, who used the 1.21 gigawatt burst to power him back to the 1980s.

  • Blast From the Past

    I found this program called Cathode that does an incredible job of recreating the experience of writing code on a CRT display, ca. 1980–83. Many was the hour I logged on the Lear-Sigler ADM-3A — in those days time was logged, so you could pay for it. That was incredibly unfair since the I/O (for…

  • The Best Cheeseburger Ever

    There’s a story about the world-famous green chili cheeseburgers served by the Owl Bar, and I’m here to tell you, they’re not kidding. The best cheeseburgers evah. (Frankly, if you’re in New Mexico, Blake’s Lotaburger is pretty good, and here in California you can’t get a better cheeseburger without green chilis than the ones they…

  • Twenty Years of Changing Everything

    Appropos of my previous post: I see that today is the 20th anniversary of Sir Tim‘s initial proposal to build a new type of text transport protocol. I guess that turned out okay. Who’d have guessed then what kind of impact that would make? (H/T: vanderleun.)

  • Reflections on Salary

    My first job out of college paid an annual salary of S. (The actual amount S represents is unimportant.) For a brief period of time, that was more money than I could imagine. (We didn’t discuss money in my family, but I have reason to believe that my dad supported us–four kids, mom, and himself–on…