271
Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
272
A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
273
Memories of .us
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
274
Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
275
Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
276
How Slide Rules Work
The survival of our species owes much to our brain, specifically, its ability to observe, analyse, and plan. Planting crops and storing grains for the winter were some of the earliest uses of these abilities. Measuring and calculating are foundational elements of observation, analysis, and planning. Computation, upon…
277
The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
278
The lost cause of the Lisp machines
I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will....
279
What Killed Perl?
Trick question! Perl is not dead. I’ll show you what I mean, and then still answer what I think killed Perl.
280
Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
281
FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
282
What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
283
Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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284
Advent of Code on the Z-Machine
Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…
285
Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
286
Installing and using HP-UX 9
A few weeks back I got a note on Bluesky, linking me to a website offering a free computer. The owner was in Cambridge, not far from me, and the computer was an HP 9000/300 Series - a Model 340, specifically.
287
How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
288
The Sega Master System
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
289
Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
290
A file format uncracked for 20 years
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
291
Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
292
A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
293
Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
294
When Soviet-made cars roamed Singapore roads
From the seventies to nineties, cars that roamed Singapore roads were largely imported from countries such as Australia (Holden), Czechoslovakia (Skoda), France (Citroen, Peugeot, Renault), Germany…
295
Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)
LISP-NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE-1980
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The Useful Personal Computer
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
297
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and l…
298
The decline of deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
299
Movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s
Discover the wild world of Ghanaian and Nigerian hand-painted movie posters. Created by local artists in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold, surreal artworks turned Hollywood films into folk art masterpieces that are so bad they’re brilliant.
300
How ancient people saw themselves
The art of the ancient mirror