2041
Powering a Mainframe
The last few days have been eventful. I was contacted by the datacenter that the mainframe's cage is now ready for moving in, and the power ...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2042
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
2043
Why airplane windows have round corners (2016)
It's to prevent them from killing you
2044
2045
Thaddeus Kosciusko
So, we know all about the heroes of the American Revolution, right? George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere – OK, well, not him, he was a good silversmith, an average errand rider, and a godawfu…
2046
Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
Create beautiful emails, automate campaigns, and track performance. Try it now and see how our tools can drive your business.
2047
The Mortgaging of Sierra Online
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
2048
Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
2049
Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer
Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the f...
2050
The Origin of Banking (2016)
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell my chickens…
2051
2052
Rethinking the Commodore 64 Memory Map (2018)
I've had my head down, programming away on C64 OS, and been making some great progress. I've tweeted a few things out, some of which are revealing of things I've either never talked about here or even seem to contradict what I've said here. So I'd like to take a breather and talk about some of these developments.
2053
Vintage video game cartridges with built-in modems
A lot of contemporary video game players take online communications for granted—after all, online services have been a standard feature in consoles for nearly fifteen years at this point1. However, before the ubiquity of the internet there was a time when some clever cartridges let gamers run up to the...
2054
Live coding a vi for CP/M from scratch
The other day, being unable to find a suitable open-source text editor for cpmish , I sat down and wrote a simple vi-like editor. It took nine hours. I have it all on video.
2055
2056
NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini and making the kernel power failure proof
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
2057
Atari Centipede’s Hidden Code Trap
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
2058
A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
2059
When Pepsi Had a Navy
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
2060
2061
“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
2062
Turbinia – An Uninvited Guest (2014)
Turbinia - An Uninvited Guest
2063
2064
This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
2065
Soviet Arcade Games from the 70s and 80s
I was thinking recently that here in the West we take our video game history largely for granted. Look back at the Golden Age of video games, and it’s apparent that we had it pretty good R…
2066
Historical Map of the Cognitive Sciences: An Attempt
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
2067
Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
2068
IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
2069
“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
2070
Ilya Starinov – The godfather of modern insurgent IED warfare
I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post. Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in…