1891
A circuit board from the Saturn V rocket, reverse-engineered and explained
In the Apollo Moon missions, the Saturn V rocket was guided by an advanced onboard computer system built by IBM. This system was built fro...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1892
In Depth: The Game Boy Printer
Diving deep into how this Game Boy accessory really works
1893
Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
1894
1895
1896
The most expensive typefaces (2019)
The most expensive typeface I encountered is JHA Bodoni Ritalic, at €4,401.99 (almost $5,000) for a single font.
1897
The Web is the Next Platform (1995)
I started working full-time on what became Internet Explorer 1.0 in early October, 1994, grew the engineering team to 67 individuals by the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August, 1996, and got very litt…
1898
Philip Anderson 1923-2020
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
1899
Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of…
1900
Smalltalk-87
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
1901
Compaq and Coronavirus
Compaq’s descent from a company of action to a brand is a frightening parable for the the West’s focus on talk over action.
1902
Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020203 points237 commentscited by 39History & Retro Computing details
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
1903
Your First THINK C Program
Welcome, child! Come in, come in! I have so few visitors to this little hut. Pull up a chair, and I’ll put on some tea.
1904
Remembering the LAN
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent's medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address…
1905
Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...
1906
Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
1907
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
1908
Book Review: Hoover
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
1909
Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
1910
1911
Looking inside a vintage Soviet TTL logic integrated circuit
This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, ...
1912
Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
1913
Wiring and Cabling: How to Lace Cable Harnesses (1962)
From OP 2230, "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment" , published by the direction of the chief of the Bureau of Naval Weapons , 1 December, 1962. pp. 7-9 --- 7-14.
1914
1915
How early American inventors funded their ventures
From Colt's traveling show to the Wrights' bicycle shop
1916
Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
Or, the JAM stack.
1917
The core memory inside a Saturn V rocket's computer
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) had a key role in the Apollo Moon mission, guiding and controlling the Saturn V rocket. Like most...
1918
Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
How to answer this question—and how not to
1919
Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
1920
2020 Leap Day Bugs
The following is a list of many bugs caught on or near leap day, February 29th, 2020. Each link below references the issue with supporting details where available.