The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points62 commentscited by 8History & Retro Computing details
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
I fell down the rabbit hole making a homebrew SNES game a few days ago, and since I couldn't find many good resources, I figured I'd write something of a tutorial.
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
NUKEMAP was released into the world a decade ago, believe it or not.
The ASR33, like most teletypes of the era, works at a fixed rate. It does 10 characters per second. It is 110 Baud, using 1 start, 8 data (i...
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
Didn't you ever wish your<br>computer understood you?
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
In his book Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, G. H. Hardy tells this famous story: He could remember the idiosyncracies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It …
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022133 points61 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the long-awaited first part of a series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers…
How Classicists tricked themselves into not learning Latin well.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points82 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
Surviving Hell
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
A dive into Seoul Metro's Line 9
I've always been curious about the story of Bell Labs – how it was formed, why it was successful, its challenges and struggles, innovation engine, people, its organizational structure, operations, and its legacy. The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is an excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary of what, how, and
Texts on this and that.
