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The great Medieval water myth (2013)
A food history blog, focusing mainly on early medieval food and French bread history, written by Jim Chevallier (visit chezjim.com for more). .
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
362
That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020121 points103 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
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What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
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The IBM PC, Part 1 (2012)
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
365
An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
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One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
368
The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers in Visual C++ (2019)
Getting ahead of the standard, which went a different way.
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The outside investigation of SoftRAM 95 (2021)
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
370
Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
371
What the author of ARC thinks about Phil Katz
Some folks have asked me what I know about Phil Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Phil Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I…
372
The 6502 in “The Terminator”
In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800’s view several times. It is well-known that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800’s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: It’s Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of…
373
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
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The Unix Magic Poster
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
376
Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was ...
377
The Origins of DS_store (2006)
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
378
The Commodordion
The Commodordion is an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape.
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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
382
Understanding the War in Ukraine
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022429 points605 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
383
Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
384
The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
385
Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
388
Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020352 points302 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
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A Brief History of the UUID
Discover the evolution of UUIDs. Explore cloud communication trends, customer stories, and tips for scalable apps with Twilio's APIs. Learn more now!