The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020260 points40 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
For those who’ve been long-time readers of SoylentNews, it’s not exactly a secret that I have a personal interest in retro computing and documenting the history and evolution of the Personal Computer. About three years ago, I ran a series of articles about restoring Xenix 2.2.3c, and I’m far overdue on writing a new…
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
I recently wrote a final paper on the history of written numerals. In the process, I discovered this fascinating tidbit that didn’t really fit in my paper, but I wanted to put it somewhere. So I’m writing about it here.
How I found a vintage Apple IIe computer on the sidewalk and brought it back to life
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
I saw an ad for a tiny chip 1 that provides 5 volts 2 of isolated power: You feed 5 volts in one side, and get 5 volts out the other si...
Ever wondered what that tree is you passed during your lockdown exercise walk? There's a website that tells you the answer.
10 years ago, systemd was announced and swiftly rose to become one of the most persistently controversial and polarizing pieces of software in recent history, and especially in the GNU/Linux world. The quality and nature of debate has not improved in the least from the major flame wars around 2012-2014, and systemd…
The Nintendo Game Boy Color is a handheld game console that was released in 1998. It uses an audio amplifier chip to drive the internal s...
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
a blog post by @azwinkau
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020216 points205 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
Can you run a 8086 PC-XT emulation with 640K RAM, 80×25 CGA composite video and a 1.44MB MS-DOS disk on a ESP12E without additional components? Yes, you can and I did. The CPU emulator is a po…
