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Xbox 360 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1322
50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)
I was asked to give a toast in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of [The Mother of All Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos) so I spent some time reflecting on Engelbart's w...
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The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your […]
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Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox . The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern…
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AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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Game Boy Camera Canon EF Lens Mount (2018)
I designed and 3D Printed a Canon EF Mount for my Game Boy Camera.
1327
The First Lisp Compiler
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
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My Mega65 has arrived
This week I returned from a business trip overseas for the past few weeks. This is why I haven't been able to blog this month until now. But...
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What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
1330
The Story of Heroku
Heroku made it easy for any developer to build and run applications in the cloud without managing their own infrastructure. Now, 15 years later, it continues to inspire the next generation of developers.
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Original Pong did not have any code or even a microprocessor
Here is a link to full schematics. Thanks to whoever made this. I just found a few issues with it. The CLK input to the 7474 on page 2 should be HRESET, not CLK. Pin 5 of the 555's on pages 5 and 6 should be connected to the capacitor. Also some of the nodes are inconsistently labeled.
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Alan Turing using math to repair his bike
Audio Link With the arrival of summer weather in many parts of the U.S., it’s time to think again about various outdoor activities. Wat...
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Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
The quest for the earliest transcript of a computer game uncovers a surprisingly complex computer strategy game from the 1950s.
1335
Is This a Tank?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022132 points79 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Building on last week’s post on tanks and a few of the comments there, this week I wanted to talk about the ancient (and medieval) weapon-systems often analogized to tanks and the degree to w…
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Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆
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King George and Tsar Nicolas Looked a Lot Alike
haha, everyone says we look alike but i dont see it
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
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Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor
The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hund...
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My story on “worse is better” (2018)
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
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Unix command line conventions over time
ETA, 2022-05-19: I'm happy this blog post has gathered a fair bit of interest. However, this post is as much effort as I'm prepared to put into the topic. I think it would be a good idea to write an essay, article, or even a book, on how syntax of the Unix command line has varied over the years, and in different…
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022194 points208 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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Japanese Words in Neuromancer
This is a reblog/translation of a post by Héctor García… During the 80s in the United States, Japan was started to be seen as the inevitable first economic power of the world. It went from be…
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How Crossrail was affected by the curvature of the Earth (2018)
Crossrail's tunnels under London are long, so long that when they were being planned, they were affected by something you might not expect -- the curvature of the earth.
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Lisp in Space
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
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The PalmOS powered wristwatch from Fossil
Imagine a smartwatch you could load any PalmOS app you wanted onto. We had that... about 20 years ago.
1350
Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios
On this page of Talmud we read of a very bizarre case: יבמות נד, א אָמַר רַבָּה: נָפַל מִן הַגָּג וְנִתְקַע — חַיָּיב בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרִים, וּבִיבִמְתּוֹ לֹא קָנָה. בְּנֵזֶק, בְּצַעַר, בְּשֶׁבֶת, בְּרִפּוּי. אֲבָל בּוֹשֶׁת לָא מִיחַיַּיב, דְּאָמַר מָר: אֵין חַיָּיב עַל הַבּוֹשֶׁת עַד