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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Sneaking into the auditorium for the Windows 2000 launch rehearsal
Wait, that's not him.
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ZX Spectrum Next Laptop
Having created a laptop style case for my ZX Spectrum Next dev board previously, I wanted to re-visit the idea of a Spectrum laptop and address some of the issues faced in the previous version.
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Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran : High-performance parallel programming language
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
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Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 was awarded jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
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Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
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2026 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine: Deisseroth, Hegemann, Nagel
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
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VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
100% cotton paper. 100% crazy.
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Boards of Casio
While working away on the CZP-1 , which was at least initially an effort to create a Casio CZ-101 on a web page I happened to see this YouTube video by oliveoil22:
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A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
Right-clicking and shift-clicking.
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The "Windows XP Box" (2003)
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
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Jean-Pierre Serre turns 100
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made important contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory. He was a member of Bourbaki.
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Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Explore Claude Fable 5.1's proposed solution to Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a centuries-old cipher, with the reasoning behind the result.
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What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
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Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
The humble Suica card was developed in the 90’s and has kept Japan moving for almost three decades. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
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Vintage Artificial Intelligence: Before It Got Awkward
Long before the current kerfuffle about LLMs, Generative AI Artwork, and asking your tax preparation chatbot for a cookie recipe, the concept of artificial intelligence and synthetic life was a pervasive theme in creative and engineering works. We have the ground-breaking appearance of Rossum's Universal Robots (or…
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Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended. Every Windows 95 box has an anti-piracy hologram on the side. The photographer chose his
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The little-known winstart.bat batch file
It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.
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Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.
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Everything I Know (1975)
Everything I Know During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. Jump to Sections Introduction These …
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Twenty Years of Pandoc
A universal document converter
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Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.