2281
Repairing the card reader for a 1960s mainframe: cams, relays and a clutch
I recently helped repair the card reader for the Computer History Museum's vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. In the process, I learned a lot abou...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2282
Designing Windows 95’s User Interface
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
2283
2284
An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end (2011)
Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March & 9 April 2016, and 28 December 2023. The…
2285
2286
The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…
2287
Running BBS Door Games on Windows 10 with GameSrv and DOSBox
I continue to enjoy seeing what can be done with WSL (Windows Subsystem for ...
2288
Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
2289
Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
2290
Legends of the Ancient Web (2017)
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
2291
Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…
2292
An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
2293
Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
2294
Modern Linux in an ancient PC
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
2295
2296
How the Å came to be
Major upheavals in printing technology, language, politics, and religion converged in the fourteenth century, setting the stage for a brand…
2297
Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the…
2298
2299
The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
2300
Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply
A few weeks ago, I wanted to use one of the vintage IBM 1401 mainframe computers at the Computer History Museum, but the computer wasn't wor...
2301
Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM
It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…
2302
Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64
2303
What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
2304
Apple Power Macintosh G5: Flame On
Let's have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5 , a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks. So weighty that it crea...
2305
The beginning of the end for copper wire
The FCC voted last Thursday to relax the rules for retiring copper wiring. This change was specifically aimed at Verizon and AT&T and is going to make it a lot easier for them to tear down old …
2306
Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
2307
Baking Bread with the Romans: Part II – Panis Quadratus
Taste the daily life of Romans with this recipe for Panis Quadratus: The infamous sectioned bread excavated at Pompeii and preserved for millenia after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
2308
2309
History of AOL Warez
Link to original post on rajuabju.com Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez ...
2310
The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…