691
Where did you go, Ms. Pac-Man?
We lost the female counterpart to Pac-Man in 2020, but Namco had been plotting her demise years beforehand.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
692
Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.
693
The History of DR DOS
The last of Digital Research
694
Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
695
Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
696
I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student…
697
Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
698
Francis Ford Coppola's “Godfather Notebook”
"IF FOUND--Please return to Paramount Pictures"
699
When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
It hasn't. Yet. But only because of a few dozen people living in an area smaller than Disney World.
700
My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
701
702
The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
703
If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
704
What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
705
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon using the pencil (2007)
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using the Pencil Introduction The best and most stable way to overclock your Athlon and Duron CPU is ...
706
Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
707
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
708
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
709
Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
710
Lewis Carroll – computing the day of the week for any given date (1887)
A letter from Lewis Carroll to Nature, March 31, 1887: Having hit upon the following method of mentally computing the day of the week for any given date, I send it you in the hope that it may interest some of your readers. I am not a rapid computer myself, and as I find my average time for doing any such question is…
711
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
712
300k airplanes in five years
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
713
When Kodak and Polaroid went to war
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
714
Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…
715
Reversing Choplifter
The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games. Like any platform, however, the number of truly great games within that range is much smaller. If you ask any former (or…
716
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
717
An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)
When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…
718
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth -- that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water -- but it's a myth.
719
Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
720
The Reign of Alexander III of Macedon
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024127 points106 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly k…