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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The Berkeley Software Distribution
UNIX is always litigious
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This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
A Celebration of Donald E Knuth
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The Future That Never Was
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
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Singapore Airlines Concorde
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
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An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91
A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Porta...
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Byte Interviews the Apple Lisa Dev Team (1983)
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa.
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I accidentally deleted a bad game revision from MAME
Awhile back, I had the chance to dump a game for MAME. I told myself that if the chance ever came up again, I’d contribute again. Luckily, it turns...
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A History of the TTY
It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY.
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Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
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Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches (1994)
In addition to the basic materials, a number of safety-related items were needed to conduct this experiment. First, a suitable location for the experiment was required, it being expected that the kitchen was not the appropriate place for blow-torching SPTs. The author's driveway was chosen as a suitable site. Second…
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Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
Posted on Wednesday 21 Feb 2024. 1,196 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.
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Game Font Forensics
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
Symbolic of the transfer of power from IBM to Microsoft?
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Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I ...
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As much as you ever wanted to know about 155M artillery shell production
America: The Ultimate Crammer
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Vision 1993
I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in…
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Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)
An english translation of Edsger W. Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV.
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How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.
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David Kahn has died
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.
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Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
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The Burial of William the Conqueror: A Comedy of Errors
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
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How we crowdfunded $750k for a giant book about keyboard history
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.