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Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 64 posts.
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The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
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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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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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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020175 points23 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: ...today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over d
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Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? (2013)
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
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Where Did Combinators Come From? Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel
A dive into the unknown personal and academic history of the mathematician who developed combinators, Moses Schönfinkel.
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Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
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ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020112 points12 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food product…
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A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
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Things Unexpectedly Named After People
Unfortunately, Rocket Lab does not seem to be named after seed investor/aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket .
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Six works of Computer Science-Fiction (2015)
Computer Science-Fiction 1 is not actually fiction. Instead, these are books of computer science and/or programming that when you read them you can’t quite believe that what they claim is reality. Indeed, very often works of Computer Science-Fiction push the limits of your understanding of just what constitutes the…
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Using machine learning to recreate photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors
Artistic interpretations of the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate, created with AI and historical references.
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Little Things That Made Amiga Great
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…
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A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
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Wirecard – The “German Enron”, and a personal history
For those who just came back from a 15 year space mission: Wirecard is a German company that according to its website is ” one of the world’s fastest-growing digital platforms for fina…
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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
Our mission is to preserve open source software for future generations by storing your code in an archive built to last a thousand years.
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Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.