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The Color of the Future: A history of blue
A history of blue 🦋
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Keyboards from my collection (2023)
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
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Vetinari's Clock (2011)
In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.
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When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
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Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
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The day Return became Enter (2023)
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
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"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
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Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis
Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5. i reverse-engineered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5! check it out at github.com/schlae/cm5-r... [image or embed] — Tube Time…
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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
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I made a floppy disk from scratch
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things
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Debugging Behind the Iron Curtain (2010)
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
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Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons…
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Who Invented Backpropagation?
Its modern version (the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Seppo Linnainmaa
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BBC Micro, ancestor to ARM
Meet my BBC Master, plus 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and three-button mouse
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Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person'
Link to: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466
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Bullfrog in the Dungeon
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
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When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
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Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)
The 80’s was a decade of many things — excess, greed, and big hair, to name a few — but it was also the heyday for airbrush art. As a teenager in the late 80’s, I desperately wanted an airbrush so I could paint my favorite band logos on the back of my jean jacket, and maybe make some money on the side painting…
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1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
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Inside OS/2 (1987)
A 1987 technical introduction to OS/2, covering its architecture, multitasking capabilities, API, and kernel system services.
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The History of Windows XP
NT Vincit Omnia
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A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
In May 1991 a Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyev was sent into space. At the end of the year he was still circling around the Earth waiting for a spaceship to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower but would return to a world where there was no Soviet Union any more. The Soviet empire…
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Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
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You know more Finnish than you think
Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, maki…
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This Old SGI: notes and memoirs on the Silicon Graphics 4D series (1996)
I am posting this assortment of notes and observations as a kind of "thank you" to the numerous people who have replied to my posts in the past. The free flow of information is the life-blood of the internet community, and this is my feeble attempt to maintain that flow, while at the same time repaying the kindness…
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A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
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Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2025214 points83 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of al…
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Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly…
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More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work
I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase , or that have copyleft designs .