2011
Oppenheimer and the Gita (2014)
What did Oppenheimer mean when he famously said, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds"? A foray into the Bhagavad-Gita.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2012
2013
A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
2014
Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
2015
Take a Look at the Crossrail Station Under Bond Street
Of all the Crossrail stations, the most controversial has to be Bond Street - as it's so behind schedule that it might not open when the Elizabeth line's own delayed opening takes place.
2016
2017
Origin Sells Out
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
2018
The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
2019
2020
How to Build a Pyramid
Exactly how did the Egyptians build the Pyramid of Khufu and its two great successors on the Giza Plateau? That question has been debated at least since the time of Herodotus. Many a person has looked upon what the Egyptians are alleged to have wrought, compared it with the early date which historians assign to it…
2021
Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum
Down a rather shabby road in a Cambridge industrial estate can be found a haven of retro computing delights - the Centre for Computing History.
2022
A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
2023
The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
2024
Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...
2025
Things to Know About GNU Readline
What is GNU Readline and where did it come from?
2026
A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
A vision of an OS that recognizes that any user activity and most of the system activities are nothing but queries, which ought to be treated uniformly and implemented efficiently once and for all; database as a file system; A paper submitted to MacHack'95
2027
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
2028
Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
This post recaps some of the C64 coding tricks used in my little Commodore 64 coding competition . The competition rules were simple: make a C64 executable (PRG) that draws two lines to form the below image. The objective was to do this in as few bytes as possible.
2029
Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…
2030
“Bicycle of the Mind”
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
2031
Building a vacuum tube computer
Having 32 (31) registers, this means that a refresh will be issued each 256us. To be on the safe side, the capacitor should keep its charge much longer than that. Testing with both EAA91 (ideal diode) and some semiconductors: Diode charge hold time Comment EAA91 >500us ideal diode 1N4148 >500us for reference, leakage…
2032
We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
2033
Commodore 900
Click the Commodore icon to return. Intending to use pictures or text from this page? Please read this notice . Last modify 11 August 2020.
2034
Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
2035
Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
2036
Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
2037
2038
Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
2039
Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
2040
