1681
Wing Commander III
Movies and computer games are my two favorite things. If I weren’t doing one I’d be doing the other.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1682
Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021137 points11 commentscited by 12History & Retro Computing details
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This week we are starting the first of a four (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) part look at pre-modern textile prod…
1683
Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
I tend to use a lot of retro software, partly because I’m a big nerd but also because I just prefer to work in a terminal. There were a ton of major commercial software products for MS-DOS that were highly polished, and can still be used effectively in an xterm today.
1684
The Last Message Sent on AIM
In the early 2000s social media sites like Facebook and Twitter weren’t commonplace yet. Even text messages, at ten cents each, were something to be rationed. For many teenagers the primary means of communication outside school was AOL Instant Messenger (AIM). So when it was announced in October that they were…
1685
Strange chip: Teardown of a vintage IBM token ring controller
IBM used some unusual techniques in its integrated circuits, and one of the most visible is packaging them in square metal cans. I've been...
1686
Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with
This post contains my own opinions, not the opinions of my employer or any open source groups I belong or contribute to.
1687
Ancient Babylonian Algorithms: The Earliest Programs
An interactive, illustrated timeline of historic moments in humankind's quest for information. With annotations by Jeremy Norman.
1688
Architecture of the Playstation 2
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
1689
Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...
1690
A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
1691
Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
1692
Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
1693
Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Black-and-White Silent Film (2014)
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
1694
1977: Zork
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years later.
1695
1696
1697
Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
1698
Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
As we near the end of this decade, and more importantly the end of the hell that was 2020, I realised two things. First, I survived catching Covid-19, and secondly that I had a good story about the…
1699
Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
A list of things any decent Tolkien fan should avoid, ignore, despise and never ever share except for enlightening people they are getting it wrong. Thanks!
1700
A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
1701
IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
1702
Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
1703
1704
What color was “Apple Beige”?
I went looking for a defining color of the personal computer era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
1705
The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)
In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.
1706
DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
1707
Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
Windows 3.1 allowed you to change all system colors to your liking. Linux been fully themeable since the 90s. OSX came along with a draconian “all blue aqua, and maybe a hint of gray”.
1708
Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
1709
Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
1710
USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018)
**US Navy SubmarineAircraft Carrier design** In the late 1950s the US Navy experimented with the concept of aircraft carrying submarines armed with jet fighters… Read More >….