961
Railway Safety Posters (2022)
These are posters warning of potential hazards on the railway. They were used for public relation relations at various stations to alert passengers and the gene
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
962
963
The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
964
The IPv6 mess (2002)
Each computer on the Internet has its own public IPv4 address, similar to a phone number: for example, 131.193.178.181. The target of each packet of data is identified by a public IPv4 address.
965
Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
966
967
20 Years of Vim
Create and share beautiful and engaging annotated charts2023212 points76 commentsTools & Productivity details
The hard work from maintainers turned Vim into a completely new editor, while still maintaining its spirit.
968
Reading Ancient Scrolls
This is an elaboration of my submission for the letter detection prize as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in June. It gets technical and esoteric but the first few paragraphs are of general interest…
969
The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
970
How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIa: Starting Down the Path of Honors
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023109 points48 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the third of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries. Last time we discussed Rome&…
971
The time SUSE, the German Linux company, banned mentioning Jewish holidays
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
972
Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
973
This code smells of desperation
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
974
Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
975
976
Why early modern books are so beautiful
Three theories
977
Netscape Meteors
I went on a small journey the last couple days to find the original Netscape Navigator “meteors” animation. This one has a special place in my head and heart because it is so clearly connected to my memories of discovering the web as a kid. Here it is in its original 60×60 px glory:
978
Cyberdecks (2013)
Article about the philosophy of custom made computers without displays, usually known as decks.
979
IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
980
Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
We’ve spoken about arcade Tron a few times here on the blog over the years. Specifically, I shared some development documents a few months back here. For those of you that don’t know, T…
981
How to Roman Republic 101
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023145 points37 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the first of a planned five-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquit…
982
The Internet Free Zone (1997)
The Internet Free Zone Home Page.
983
Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
984
When did people stop being drunk all the time?
Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.
985
Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
986
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
987
A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
The original specimen of the Dutch Fell Types, their digitisation by Igino Marini, and further enhancements by Lin Yangchen as a font for thesis typesetting in LaTeX.
988
10NES
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
989
Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
990
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...