1021
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1022
Game Font Forensics
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
1023
1024
Satya Nadella uses an IBM AS/400 in 1993
Symbolic of the transfer of power from IBM to Microsoft?
1025
Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I ...
1026
Nokia made too many phones
TextQuery is a desktop app to import data file as a table, query it using SQL.
1027
It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
1028
How SSH port became 22 (2017)
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
1029
As much as you ever wanted to know about 155M artillery shell production
America: The Ultimate Crammer
1030
Vision 1993
I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in…
1031
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
1032
Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)
An english translation of Edsger W. Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV.
1033
1034
How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.
1035
David Kahn has died
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.
1036
Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
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1038
The Burial of William the Conqueror: A Comedy of Errors
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
1039
An Introduction to the WARC File (2021)
Want to know more about a tool in our web archiving toolbox? Your suggestions or questions for future posts about Archive-It technology are very welcome here .
1040
How we crowdfunded $750k for a giant book about keyboard history
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
1041
Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
1042
Dungeons and Dragons turns 50 today
I'm very interested in the history of Dungeons & Dragons , but I'm not a historian – especially when compared to someone like Jon Peterson. ...
1043
ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
It’s a hellish time: prices for basic consumer goods are tripl e what they were last year. Your employer just paid your salary in eggs instead of money. There are daily shootouts between rival gangs. 🎵 Your love life’s DOA… 🎵
1044
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
1045
CRT Manufacturing
Explore CRT lamp history at vintageTEK. View TekTalk and TekWeek articles, photos, and PDFs documenting CRT lamp and gun assembly production.
1046
1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets
1100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets from 1956 on the interactive NukeMap. Choose a city and a bomb size, and detonate. See what happens.
1047
New York Times Flash-based visualizations work again
In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualiz…
1048
What happened to the US machine tool industry?
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
1049
How DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
1050
John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...