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When transit passes were designed by hand (2022)
In the 1930s–60s, Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company offered trolley and bus riders a weekly burst of color and hand lettering. About 300 of these tickets are now in our collection.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]
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Lego building instructions through time
Building instructions. The silent helper that without a single word guides you, step by step, to transform your pile of bricks to fantastic creations. The tool that shows you building techniques and gives you a solid foundation for further exploring the wonders of the LEGO ® brick. Let’s take a look at some of the…
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Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
This guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other…
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Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU
Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not…
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
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The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
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Perlisisms (1982)
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
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Discovery of Cold War-era rare Eastern Bloc computers in a German hangar
In 2006, CHM curators traveled to Germany to follow a lead on an abandoned collection of historical computing artifacts. In a three-story warehouse, they found a real-world timeline of computing history. After days of exploring and assessing, they brought back nearly 2,000 items for the permanent collection.
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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
The vinyl record is an analog medium. How can it be affected by the loudness war? So what’s the impact?
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The back cover of C++: The Language raises questions not answered by front cover
Not doing the reading.
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Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding
Explore how a decade of open source experiments in psychovisual modeling and compression led to JPEG XL, the future of image coding.
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KDE at 30
KDE is an open community of friendly people who want to create a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.
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Cleve Moler has died
Jack Little and Cleve Moler, cofounders of MathWorks, recognized the need among engineers and scientists for more powerful and productive computation environments beyond those provided by languages such as Fortran and C. In response to that need, they combined their expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer…
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Computer Hobby Movement in Canada
The York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) is a historical collection and a research center for the history of computing in Canada. Computer museum Canada
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Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
I want to speak to your manager.
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NetHack 5.0.0
NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
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Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
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New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
Old fashioned sleuthing and the help of modern technology leads to discovery of manuscript with poem composed by a farm labourer 1,300 years ago.
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200 Journalists Applaud the Internet Archive's Role in Preserving Public Record
Journalists are thanking the Internet Archive for their respectful preservation of news and history and for being an important resource for journalists. This letter is coming at a time where many major media outlets are questioning whether to allow the Wayback Machine to continue to preserve journalism.
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Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?