Hacker News: SeenNotHeard

New comment by SeenNotHeard in "John C. Dvorak has died"

SeenNotHeard — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 20:40:08 +0000

In my youth, his InfoWorld columns were appointment reading. A one-of-a-kind in the industry.

AttoChess, a complete, playable chess program for 16-bit x86 DOS in 278 bytes

SeenNotHeard — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 18:33:24 +0000

Article URL: https://nicholas-afk.github.io/AttoChess/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938372

Points: 35

# Comments: 18

The Relaunch of the Old West and Why I Chose Vanilla PHP

SeenNotHeard — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 17:23:04 +0000

Article URL: https://blog.alexseifert.com/2026/06/02/the-relaunch-of-the-old-west-and-why-i-chose-vanilla-php/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48386875

Points: 5

# Comments: 1

IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields

SeenNotHeard — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:28:18 +0000

Article URL: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20260505-00/?p=112298

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48025687

Points: 397

# Comments: 240

San Francisco streets with confusingly similar names

SeenNotHeard — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 22:25:16 +0000

Article URL: https://j-nelson.net/san-francisco-streets-with-similar-names/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47969045

Points: 29

# Comments: 47

Was Windows 1.0's lack of overlapping windows a legal or a technical matter?

SeenNotHeard — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:15:06 +0000

Article URL: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32511/was-windows-1-0s-lack-of-overlapping-windows-a-legal-or-a-technical-matter

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47253160

Points: 105

# Comments: 82

Origin of the rule that swap size should be 2x of the physical memory

SeenNotHeard — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:09:33 +0000

Article URL: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32492/origin-of-the-rule-that-swap-size-should-be-2x-of-the-physical-memory

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47159364

Points: 66

# Comments: 76

How were large Unix installations managed in the 80s/90s?

SeenNotHeard — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 20:53:18 +0000

Article URL: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32279/how-were-large-unix-installs-managed-in-the-80s-90s

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45997562

Points: 7

# Comments: 5

A surprise with how '#!' handles its program argument in practice

SeenNotHeard — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 19:32:27 +0000

Article URL: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/ShebangRelativePathSurprise

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970885

Points: 116

# Comments: 107

The old church where one trillion webpages are being saved

SeenNotHeard — Mon, 17 Nov 2025 18:19:37 +0000

Article URL: https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/16/business/video/internet-archive-wayback-machine-church-digvid

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45956295

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

There's No Rust on This Ironclad Kernel: An OS Written in Ada

SeenNotHeard — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 18:40:07 +0000

Article URL: https://hackaday.com/2025/11/12/theres-no-rust-on-this-ironclad-kernel/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45918720

Points: 8

# Comments: 0

Who was "Paul's Method" named after (a.k.a. the MOS 6502 RTS trick)?

SeenNotHeard — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:36:54 +0000

Article URL: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/32191/pauls-method-moniker-for-the-6502-rts-trick

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45697061

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Why Unix requires mount points

SeenNotHeard — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 17:25:17 +0000

Article URL: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/MountPointsExistenceWhy

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45696907

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by SeenNotHeard in "Action was the best 8-bit programming language"

SeenNotHeard — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 23:16:31 +0000

One limitation not mentioned is that Action! didn't support recursion. This had to do with how local variables were stored.

Whether it was the best language for 8-bit programming, it certainly was a great fit for the 6502, as the language targeted the peculiarities of that chip. Accessing hardware-specific features of the 8-bit Atari's was a snap, which was necessary in order to do anything more interesting than sieves or print loops.

Action! probably could've been ported to the Apple line, but 8-bits were winding down by the time it was released. Porting to 16-bit machines like the IBM PC or Mac (or even the Atari ST) would have been a tougher sell, since Pascal and C were better established by that point, and worked well on those machines.

Two bad things about Action!: Charging a license fee to distribute the runtime, and that dumb bang in the name.