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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford
The Real Story
The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
In August 1999, Apple announced the first Power Mac G4: 1 The Power Mac G4 is powered by the revolutionary new PowerPC G4 chip architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, and is the first personal computer in history to deliver supercomputer-level performance of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The…
Zero point leet seconds (2018)
While calculating certain round-trip times, here is a number I came across that is surprisingly memorable: It takes light 0.1337 seconds to travel the length of the Earth's equator via vacuum or air. Let me repeat that. It takes light "zero point leet" seconds to travel once around the equator.
RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
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Wii U Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, try four
Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workst...
An Apple II Tale
I’ve been an active IRC users for nearly 25 years now, and for many of those years I was a denizen of the #a2c.chat channel on the irc.a2central.com IRC server. (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a channel-based internet text … Continue reading →
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
Somali Law (2013)
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
Old tech is haunted
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388
A deeper analysis of the events which caused a Kazakh airliner to go out of control over Portugal in November 2018.
Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
Refurb Weekend: PowerBook 1400
The PowerBook 1400 is, and remains, my favourite laptop. It was everything the PowerBook 5300 should have been and more. It was my first l...
The Commodordion
The Commodordion is an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape.
NEC’s Tetris Processor
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
It was all downhill after the Cuecat
Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent.
The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)
Today's date is a good excuse to memorize a few more digits of 3.1415926 53589793 23846264 33832795....
The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers
If you want to watch the video first, it is below
Cash, Canadians and CPUs: Intel's 'Lost' Early Microprocessor
The story of Microsystems International and the Intel 4005
Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac
Home | Polski > Computer history > Advertisements > International > Apple Computer > Macintosh Newsweek advertisement Go back | Previous | Next Apple bought all of the advertising space in November/December special election issue of Newsweek in 1984, and devoted it all to Macintosh. Below you can see all 39 pages of…
Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
But these browsers have one great feature: They give a very good indication whether a page is worth reading. If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content, either (In a few cases I looked up the page with something more advanced (e.g., Arena), and I was always…
Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro
Every once in a while, someone asks about my interests. I usually just say I'm into home computers from the 1980s and, since most people are very nice and polite, they then ask what I do with them. I usually say something about competing in computer graphics at "digital art festivals," because explaining what the…
Do you remember Ultima Online?
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when... Not really; I wish I were there, but I joined as soon as I could.
Going where BeOS NetPositive hasn't gone before: NetPositive+
BeOS browser : TLS apocalypse Won't keep it off line. (How do you pronounce BeOS ?) This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise s...