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History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
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The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more
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The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions . But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM. I’m…
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E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper
E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.
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Why Bell Labs Worked
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
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Intel: Winning and Losing
Idling at a Zenith
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Not a three-year-old chimney sweep (2022)
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
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How the US built 5k ships in WWII
Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced.
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From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
The one email I ever got from Steve Jobs, and it said …
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Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…
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A Tektronix TDS 684B Oscilloscope Uses CCD Analog Memory
I have a Tektronix TDS 684B oscilloscope that I bought cheaply at an auction. It has 4 channels, 1 GHz of BW and a sample rate of 5 Gsps. Those are respectable numbers even by today’s standards. It’s also the main reason why I have it: compared to modern oscilloscopes, the other features aren’t nearly as impressive…
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History of “Adventure” for the Atari 2600
Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today.
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Oberon Pi
Oberon, the jewel by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht: Operating System, Compiler and Computer.
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Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2025513 points318 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re looking at a specific visual motif common in TV and film: the arrow volley. You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then…
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Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry
That soon-to-reenter Cosmos 482 is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details.
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The History of Album Art
Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.
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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer
You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.
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The Brief Origins of May Day
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country…
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108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring
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Joining Sun Microsystems – 40 years ago (2022)
40 years ago today: I joined a tiny startup called Sun Microsystems. What a ride! Here’s the never-before-told story of how I arrived at Sun as employee #8! 🧵 I started out in Silicon Valley …
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Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
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East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
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ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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Bill Gates's Personal Easter Eggs in 8 Bit BASIC (2008)
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
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The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…