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Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today
I'm very interested in the history of Dungeons & Dragons , but I'm not a historian – especially when compared to someone like Jon Peterson. ...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
It’s a hellish time: prices for basic consumer goods are tripl e what they were last year. Your employer just paid your salary in eggs instead of money. There are daily shootouts between rival gangs. 🎵 Your love life’s DOA… 🎵
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Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
814
New York Times Flash-based visualizations work again
In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualiz…
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What happened to the US machine tool industry?
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
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How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
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John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
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Leaving Arizona – the Story of the Motorola 6800 part 2 and creation of the 6502
Part 2 of The Story of the Motorola 6800
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Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
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Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
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Glucoboy
Emulating the unknown: Blood testing device for the GBA
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Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
This is, so far, the only article of mine that's been completely deleted from Wikipedia. I've salvaged a copy of it from Search.com , since it's gone from the site's history now, and am putting it here until I decide what else to do with it. Non-PC compatible x86 computers For much of the time that…
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Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
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AI or Ain't: Eliza
Explore the intriguing history of Eliza, a pioneering chatbot, and learn how to implement a basic version in Go, unraveling the roots of conversational AI.
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A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
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Ultima (2012)
When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth , a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as…
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Niklaus Wirth, 1934-2024: Geek For Life
Geek For Life
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The Art of Unix Programming (2003)
This book and its on-line version are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 1.0 license, with the additional proviso that the right to publish it on paper for sale or other for-profit use is reserved to Pearson Education, Inc. A reference copy of this license may be found at…
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Thomas Cochrane
in lowercase bullet points
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Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
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Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
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2024's public domain is a banger
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
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Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
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IDEs we had 30 years ago
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)
I think it is healthy to compare historical and modern computing. Let's see how the CPUs contained in recent USB-C wall chargers compare to the power of the Apollo 11 Guidance Computer (AGC). The Apollo 11 spacecraft carried 3 humans to the moon and back in 1969.