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Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
152
Porting 3D Movie Maker to Linux
McZee meets a penguin!
153
Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
155
A History of IDEs at Google
Laurent Le Brun's blog
156
The Boring Part of Bell Labs (2025)
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my thir…
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dBase: 1979-2026
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
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I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
159
Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
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The vi family
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
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Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server
After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo . About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary.
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Comparing the Z80 and 6502 to Their Relatives
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
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Running Adobe's 1991 PostScript Interpreter in the Browser
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
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Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
166
Reverse Engineering SimTower
Creating a perfect clone of SimTower in the browser
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Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
A blog about software craft and quality
168
Math Is Hard – OpenBSD Stories
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
169
Email could have been X.400 times better
X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.
170
Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
A papyrus fragment of Homer’s epic The Iliad has been discovered inside the wrappings of Roman-era mummy . The mummy was found in a necropolis the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa) in Egypt’s Minya Governorate. Archaeologists were able to remove the papyrus and identify the text as the “Index of…
171
A Brief History of Fish Sauce
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
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The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
173
Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
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Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
A 13-year-old on a walk in the Spandau district of Berlin discovered a rare ancient bronze coin from Troy . It dates to between 281 and 261 B.C. and was issued by the mint at Ilion (Classical and Hellenistic era Troy). Now on display at the PETRI Museum, it is the first Greek antiquity ever discovered inside the city…
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Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
177
Six Characters
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
178
The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
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The Problem That Built an Industry
How a conversation on a plane in 1953 set in motion the stack that eventually processes tens of thousands of flight bookings per second, and why that stack is still here.
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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…