901
My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
902
903
The long-lost Tarzan Atari game, preserved
After 40 years, the Atari 2600 masterpiece Tarzan has been unearthed.
904
The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
905
If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
906
What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
907
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon using the pencil (2007)
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using the Pencil Introduction The best and most stable way to overclock your Athlon and Duron CPU is ...
908
Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
909
Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
910
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
911
25 Years of Krita
Halla Rempt Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name…
912
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
913
Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
914
Lewis Carroll – computing the day of the week for any given date (1887)
A letter from Lewis Carroll to Nature, March 31, 1887: Having hit upon the following method of mentally computing the day of the week for any given date, I send it you in the hope that it may interest some of your readers. I am not a rapid computer myself, and as I find my average time for doing any such question is…
915
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
916
300k airplanes in five years
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
917
918
When Kodak and Polaroid went to war
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
919
Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…
920
Reversing Choplifter
The Apple II line of computers had an amazing run, from 1977 to 1993. In that time, hundreds of thousands of pieces of software were written for it, including many tens of thousands of games. Like any platform, however, the number of truly great games within that range is much smaller. If you ask any former (or…
921
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
922
An Ode to Deluxe Paint (2023)
When first seeing an Amiga 500 computer, it wasn't the games but a copy of the painting program Deluxe Paint II that really got me hooked. Since then, computers and visual art have forever been linked in my mind. Apart from dreaming of an Amiga of my own, my boyhood interest in technical marvels was never about…
923
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth -- that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water -- but it's a myth.
924
Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
925
38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.
926
The Reign of Alexander III of Macedon
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024127 points106 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly k…
927
Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build
The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.
928
A forged Apple employee badge
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
929
930
Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.