Halfway to Christmas; time to buy presents if you haven’t already!

DragonFly on Hacker News.  I haven’t read through the comments fully.

The Meaning of “Doom”.  This article makes a very good point; Doom was one of the first game that encouraged user participation in the creation of the game.  Not the creation when it was first made, but the endless recreations as mods.  It’s sort of the same mechanism as open source, but as an activity and not a license.

Alphabet of the Obsolete.  Also known as “Things my children don’t know and don’t care about.”

Now is a good time to donate to the Internet Archive.  (via many places)

The Development of the C Language.  Dennis Richie was good at telling stories about some otherwise very dry subjects; his histories are enjoyable.  Maybe you have to have a certain kind of temperament or interest to really like them.  (via)

The Birth of Standard Error.  It was a smelly typesetting machine where it first started.   (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)

There’s some other interesting articles on that site, including “Programming Languages vs. Fat Fingers” and “The Importance of Being Declarative“.

Better and Better Keyboards.  Continuing the keyboard theme from previous weeks.  (via)

Building the Commodore C-128.  I never used one of these, but I’m sure there’s a few readers that will be gripped with nostalgia.  (via)

The Amiga 500 as a Chrome add-in.  Nostalgia, again.  (via)

Running 4.3BSD Quasijarus with simh VAX.  It’s apparently 4.3BSD for Vax hardware.  I did not know of this, or at least I don’t remember it.

When a Bash script asks, “Where am I?”.

Have you heard the axiom that every program grows in scope until it reads email?  It’s really all programs grow in complexity until they have their own auto-updater.  (Also, XScreenSaver is awesome.)

Vim, in Javascript.  Or maybe the axiom should be ‘Everything eventually is rewritten in Javascript’.  (via)

“Did you see that interstitial?  It was dope!”  (via I forget, sorry)

Your unrelated animated gif of the week: Happy talking boat.