This is a collection of texts that reflect my different interests in everything from computer programming, computer networks, computer architecture and the sociology of hackerdom all the way to religious topics, anthropology and philosophy. I would say that these interests overlap, but you be your own judge.
The list is unordered. Eventually, I might even sort the list into some sort of categories, but don't hold your breath.
With some exceptions, all these texts are, to the best of my knowledge, freely distributable. Please tell me if you find something that should not be distributed.
NB: Some of the texts that use to be here are now listed in the Retro-computing texts. They haven't actually moved, though, so old links should work.
Authors: C Gottbrath, J Bailin, C Meakin, T Thompson, J.J. Charfman
In the context of Moore's Law, overall productivity can be increased for large enough computations by `slacking' or waiting for some period of time before purchasing a computer and beginning the calculation. Very funny, but probably true.
Saltzer and Clark's paper, first published in 1981, on the "end to end" principle in distributed computer systems. This principle has been a leading star in the formation of the Internet.
Lampson's and Sturgis' unpublished paper on reliable distributed data storage.
Joel F. Bartlett's 1981 text on the Tandem Nonstop operating system. The Tandem company is now part of Hewlett-Packard and the Nonstop systems are still in use.
MIT AI Memo 239 from 1972. The seminal collection of scientific (or hackeristic?) tidbits introduced as "Here is some little known data which may be of interest to computer hackers." HTMLized by Henry Baker.
I have had a local copy of HAKMEM for years, at least since I wrote The Scriptures of Hackerdom.
Vonda N. McIntyre's hints for manuscript preparations for fiction writers.
James Gosling, the designer of the NeWS and the Andrew window systems (and now most famous for Java), rethinks the design of a window system. He basically argues for a device driver like window system with all rendering done in libraries. I thought it sounded a lot like the 8½ window system in the Plan 9 operating system.
A text by Peter Norvig and Kent Pitman on how to write Lisp code.
Henry Spencer's annotated edition of some really good advice for C programmers.
En essä av Hans "The Pink Unicorn" Persson om kulturen i mötet Inlägg }t mig i konferenssystemen KOM på LINUS vid LiU och datorföreningen Lysators nuvarande LysKOM.
Richard P. Gabriel's classical Worse is better text.
A large file describing all defined Unicode characters in Latin 1.
The same thing again, but encoded in UTF-8.
A list telling what the character known as Kenny in the South Park series is really saying.
En kort guide till hur man nyttjar AXE-funktionerna från en telefon.
A guide to the Aztec deities. Perfect for computer hostnames! For
instance: I once called the News server I was instaling for an ISP
tlazolteol.their.domain after the Aztec goddess of Filthy
Things. Very appropriate, don't you think?
A listing of rather bizarre sex laws. I don't remember where I found this, but it would amusing if it wasn't true. Perhaps it isn't true? I have no way of knowing.
The draft version of the ISO C99 Standard. Refer to the real ISO standard for real work.
Same thing, but as plain text.
John Perry's text on the Core Wars 'game'.
The essential assembly language manual for your Cray X1 system.
Dr. Jenny Sundén's essay on cyber cultures and text-based communications.
Ted Lemon's paper from the Freenix track at Usenix describing the ISC DHCP implementation.
The draft standard for the Forth programming language. For the real stuff, I refer to ANSI.
The last list of Frequently Asked Questions from the Future Culture mailing list back in the old days when Andy Hawks was still among us on the list. Lots of cyber stuff and references in here.
Lee Felsenstein's theory on the the modern day 'agora', electronic communities.
Matt Dillon's description of the virtual memory system of the FreeBSD operating system.
The lyrics for RMS' (in)famous song.
My friend Dave's insane note to the dean when dropping out of college. Hilarious.
A wonderful hackerish filk song based on Monty Python's He's a Lumberjack. I don't know who wrote this. Anyone?
Tips and tricks of the trade when it comes to posting to Usenet.
Some suggestions on how to be inspired while hacking. *grin*
MC:s egen kakfil till fortune-programmet. En samling citat som MC tyckte var bra eller roliga av någon anledning.
Kent Engströms roliga recension om denna hemska bok.
A list of things likely to be overheard if you have a Klingon for a programmer.
An interview with Professor Knuth.
Collected information on about 2350 computer languages, past and present.
Humorous account on what goes on in a mailing list.
A hackerish spoof on Star Wars.
Nikolai Bezroukov's text on hacking free software as researh.
My online friend Will Kemp's obituary of a dear friend from 1998.
Hans-Peter Nilsson's Master's thesis on porting the GNU Compiler Collection.
The wonderful Philosopher's Song as performed by the beer drinking Bruce, Bruce and Bruce from the Philosophy Department.
A weird haiku collection in memoriam of computer scientist and Internet pioneer Jon Postel who died in 1998. Written by an anonymous poet and sent, for some unknown reason, to me in my role as the postmaster of hack.org.
Lutz Prechelt's paper on the pros and cons of using different programming languages for a certain task.
The IBM z/Architecture version of the classic Principles of Operation, often known simply as PoP. A must if you want to understand the IBM mainframe architecture or want to write assembly programs or compilers for modern IBM mainframes.
Pete Fenelon's humorous list of different types of academic programmers.
Leary et al's classic work based on The Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Jon Holdsworth's old proposal of an underground decentralised computer network.
Från ett inlägg i Lysators KOM: RMA diskuterar GPL-licensen.
A list of all the instructions of the RTX32 Forth CPU.
A list of all the instructions of the SC32 Forth CPU.
As posted to comp.lang.scheme on January 17, 1996, for Scheme's twentieth birthday, by Shriram Krishnamurthi.
Top 10 Things We Want To Hear Samuel L. Jackson, "Jedi Master Mace Windu," say in the Star Wars Prequel.
The SPARC v8 manual.
The SPARC v9 (UltraSPARC) manual.
The NVRAM in Sun workstations may lose all its content in event of battery failure. To be able to boot at all, the workstation needs a host ID.
This document is for people who want to accomplish one of the following tasks:
The Sunday Times featured an article in 1995 with a pretty strange view on the electronic archive Spunk Library I founded with my net.friends Chuck, Ian and Jack. The text includes several accusations made by the Sunday Times and Computer Magazine. The last part of the file contains Ian's reply to them.
From "Everyday Zen" by Charlotte Joko Beck.
Geoffrey James version of Daodejing for programmers.
The gospel according to the disciple Thomas. One of the more believable versions of the gospel.
It has been a long standing tradition at both the Laboratory for Computer Science and the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT to allow non-laboratory people to use the laboratories' computers during off hours. These people were called "tourists". This is the policy document from the days of the Incompatible Timesharing System.
The wonderfully funny UNIX-HATERS' Handbook with descriptions of, for instance, the X Window System as a way to make a modern Unix workstation behave like an 4.77 MHz IBM PC from anno 1981.
A collectible trading card game of Usenet. Politics and global domination!
Calle Dybedahl's immensely funny posting on a.s.r with the subject Userology: On Different Kinds of Users and How to Spot Them.
War story on the different cultures of the VAX world and mainframe worlds.
A text, also in UHH, above, on how fast Suns boot. *grin*
Overview of the new Cray X1 supercomputer, the first of the NV1 architecture family.
The book on the raw X11 protocol.
Peter Gutmann's classical text on how to work with the X.509 abomination's certificates.
This "notice" on the X Window System as a dangerous virus was widely circulated at the 1989 SIGGRAPH conference in Boston.
A humorous list on what's it like to be a programmer.
A summary of the architecture for modern IBM mainframes. The little brother of the PoP, above.
Query types and responses in the Domain Name System (DNS).
András Salamon's list of resource records of the Domain Name system and references to the RFCs where they are defined.
Jonh R. Ehrman's SHARE document on the IBM z/Series architecture.
Dale Dougherty and Tim O'Reilly's classic book Unix Text Processing about troff typesetting.
Guy L. Steele's reference on the Common Lisp programming language. I am very grateful to Butterworth-Heinemann, owners of Digital Press, for allowing the CMU AI Repository to make the full text of this important reference work widely available in electronic format. The paperbound version is of course readily available at fine bookstores, or contact them directly:
Digital Press, 225 Wildwood St., Woburn, MA 01801, USA.
En filksång postad i Lysators KOM 1995-01-13 av Lars Aronsson.
En artikel om hackers från Kultursidan i tidningen Expressen 1982-06-20. Är detta månne första gången ordet "hacker" nämns i populärpress i Sverige?
A funny comparison between WNT and CP/M. I don't know who wrote this, but it's great.
PDP-10 system hacker Anthony Wachs tries the job of a playwright and writes a drama in four acts where he encounters the RH20 controller.
Another hackerish spoof on Star Wars. Written in 1994 by Paul Duncanson.
By far the best spoof on Star Wars. Written by legendary hacker Mark "MRC" Crispin in 1978.
This FAQ gives information on some of the more noticeable or notable people, places, and/or things occuring on Usenet. Not to be taken internally. This is the version last modified 1994-09-13. Somewhat out of date, but a few of these people are still around in some newsgroups.
A compendium of fact and folklore about computer hackerdom, cunningly disguised as a test. This is version 1.0 from 1989-06-16. It was conceived and written by Felix Lee, John Hayes and Angela Thomas at the end of the spring semester, 1989.
My own score on this test is 0x103, but that was many years ago. Undoubtedly, a lot of questions in this test, especially the questions about owning hardware, are now much easier to answer in affirmative than in 1989.
Yet another spoof on Star Wars, posted on Usenet in the early 1980s by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr.
Achtung! This is the original blinkenlights sign that should be in every serious computer room.
A document describing the processor architecture of the XKL-1 CPU as well as earlier CPUs in the PDP-10 family.
The influential work from 1988 of Boggs, Mogul & Kent at DEC Western Research Laboratory (now, I guess, part of Hewlett-Packard) on the behaviour of an Ethernet. Still interesting today.