3091
The Etiquette of the Victorian Ballroom: Twenty Tips for Single Gentlemen
Twenty tips addressing the basics of ballroom etiquette for single Victorian gentlemen.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
3092
When You Accidentally Break Your School Network in 1995
In my last post, I reminisced about my bbs software that I wrote and sold in 1993. In 1995, I was a senior in high school, and my school had just purchased a 76 computer Novell network for the 900 ...
3093
Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk?
One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. "At home found all well," he wrote in his diary, "but the m...
3094
3095
The fifty shades of Latin
In the bird’s-eye view, one might have the comforting illusion that country borders are also language borders. Especially where the bor...
3096
Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
3097
Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
3098
3099
3100
How SSH got port number 22
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
3101
3102
A look at my BBS Software from '93
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
3103
The History of Computer RPGs
It’s finally here! I present you our fifth release, the 450-page preview of the CRPG Book! DOWNLOAD IT HERE: CRPG Book Preview 5 This will be the last “alpha preview”, as the book…
3104
Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars
When some search for the roots of the First World War, there is a tendency to look towards the Balkans. After all, it was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian E…
3105
A customer reported an error in the map used by Flight Simulator
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
3106
The origins of XXX as FIXME
In which I go digging into source archives from 40-50 years ago, to figure out why we use XXX to mark dodgy code.
3107
Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984. While there are certainly…
3108
The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
3109
3110
Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
3111
Photos from Inside North Korea (2014)
I visited North Korea for 16 days in 2014. Here are 100 photos I took inside all corners of this secretive socialist nation.
3112
OS/2 2.0, Summer ’91 Edition
In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missing for over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release (big thanks to a very helpful reader!).
3113
On the Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674
“That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by th...
3114
Ultima VI
After Richard Garriott and his colleagues at Origin Systems finished each Ultima game — after the manic final crunch of polishing and testing, after the release party, after the triumphant show appearances and interviews in full Lord British regalia — there must always arise the daunting question of what to do next…
3115
Quote Origin: Computer Memory: 640K Ought to be Enough for Anyone
Bill Gates? James E. Fawcette? Nancy Andrews? Jerry Pournelle? InfoWorld? Apocryphal?
3116
Lego Macintosh Classic with e‑paper display
*tl;dr: I built a Wi-Fi enabled LEGO Macintosh Classic running Docker on a Raspberry Pi Zero with an e‑paper display. Docker deployments via resin.io. photos
3117
A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world
The following brief post is once again offered largely for the sake of interest, being concerned with the furthest limits of the distributio...
3118
Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
MIT Professor Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has won the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award. Often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.
3119
Hacking DNA: CRISPR, Ken Thompson, and the Gene Drive
The very nature of the human race is about to change. This change will be radical and rapid beyond anything in our species’ history. A chapter of our story just ended and the next chapter has begun. This revolution in what it means to be human will be enabled by a new genetic technology that goes by the innocuous…
3120
Recompiling the Lost Vikings
In my previous blog post I talked about reverse engineering the virtual machine used to implement objects in the Lost Vikings. The Lost Vikings was released in 1993 by Silicon and Synapse, now bett…