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Why a Slide Rule Works
Why does lining up two scales of a slide rule let you multiply numbers?
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979
Teletypes may have killed a lot of forests by emitting every line to hard copy instead of a screen, but there's something to be said for t...
273
Reverse-engineering the LM185 voltage reference chip and its bandgap reference
Many circuits, such as a computer power supply or a phone charger, require a stable voltage reference, but it's harder than you might expec...
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Visi On by VisiCorp – The obscure first full GUI for the IBM PC
Visi On was the first full GUI for the IBM PC. First demonstrated by VisiCorp at Fall Comdex 1982 and released at the end of 1983, just prior to the Apple Macintosh, it pre-dated the release of Microsoft Windows by several years.
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The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996
It's time for a little dive into mid-1990s computer history!
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86Box: Why Not Pentium III?
When does “preservation” in emulation become impractical?
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A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…
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35mm cinema film and digital audio
A while ago I decided to pick up some 35mm cinema film to help me experiment with projection optics.
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The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
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Missing Darwin Notebooks Returned to Cambridge University Library
Charles Darwin’s iconic Tree of Life notebooks anonymously left in a pink gift bag, 15 months after launch of a worldwide appeal to find them
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“Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition
1i1 “Xanadu ® ” and the Eternal-Flaming-X logo are registered trademarks of Project Xanadu .
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Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...
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Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi
A while ago a came across an old Compaq LTE 286 laptop. When they were first released around 1989, these PCs were somewhat groundbreaking because they were the first to be compact enough to resemble the “notebook” form factor that we take for granted today. Unfortunately this particular unit was pretty much beyond…
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Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
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Why the Black MacBook Cost More
From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook. The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook. The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and…
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Rescuing the Compuserve Collection
Follow a dedicated team of museum professionals and others as they race to preserve an important collection in record time.
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What made the NES so interesting?
I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interestin...
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Why we need Lisp machines
A personal mind dump on operating systems
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Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
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The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
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Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.
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Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
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The Apple-1's unusual MOS clock driver chip
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its disp...
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When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX
Macintosh Application Environment for Unix -- from back in 1994.
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Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
Aristocratic tutoring I: Explaining the decline of genius
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Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books
A look at three relics of a not-quite-bygone era. In picture-listicle form.
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Arch Linux turned 20 years old today. It was released on 11/March/2002
About Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX , a great distribution developed by Per Lidén. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades…
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Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combin...