The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
A never-before-seen 1996 interview
Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License.
The survival of our species owes much to our brain, specifically, its ability to observe, analyse, and plan. Planting crops and storing grains for the winter were some of the earliest uses of these abilities. Measuring and calculating are foundational elements of observation, analysis, and planning. Computation, upon…
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will....
Trick question! Perl is not dead. I’ll show you what I mean, and then still answer what I think killed Perl.
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
When entertaining the idea of communities issuing their own money (called complementary currencies ), people often wonder if that idea has been successfully done before. In doing our research into the concept, we encountered a number of stories where communities issued their own currency and produced a prosperity…
Explore Tektronix equipment in films and TV at vintageTEK. Find detailed screenshots and IDs of scopes, probes, and monitors from 1953–1984.
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
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Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
A few weeks back I got a note on Bluesky, linking me to a website offering a free computer. The owner was in Cambridge, not far from me, and the computer was an HP 9000/300 Series - a Model 340, specifically.
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
Reportedly Microsoft's first hardware product.
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
From the seventies to nineties, cars that roamed Singapore roads were largely imported from countries such as Australia (Holden), Czechoslovakia (Skoda), France (Citroen, Peugeot, Renault), Germany…
LISP-NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE-1980
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
