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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 337 posts.
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Found a program I wrote in 1981 and decided to bring it back to life
When you find a weird program from four decades ago and realize that it's yours.
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2006: Dwarf Fortress
The text of Dwarf Fortress and procedural tales so expansive no human could ever explore them all.
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The BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney
During the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Tinney illustrated some of the most amazing computer artwork for BYTE magazine.
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When McDonalds Came to Denmark
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
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So what is the deal with A/UX anyways?
The year is 1983, and several Apple employees visit Brown University, and get some idea of what Universities want in a computer for the coming future. The big buzz of the era was the so called 3M machine:
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Project Deluge: Xbox and Dreamcast
Project Deluge (Lot Page) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (List) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (Matched List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (Matched List) Discuss this release on our Discord server!
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Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021126 points31 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…
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The Linux Distributions of 1992
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
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Story of the Flash Fill Feature in Excel
My POPL 2011 “Flash Fill” paper was the most important turning point in my research career. I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will…
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Turing Oversold?
It is not the fault of Turing, though.
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How factories were made safe
The fundamental cause was a wrong attitude towards the core question: who is responsible for safety?
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PalmOS on Raspberry Pi
My PalmOS port is making progress on a desktop computer, with keyboard, mouse and a 1920×1080 monitor for display. While that was interesting, I wanted to try a different form factor, one tha…
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Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
And other misadventures
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No One Ever Saw the Snow Cruiser Again (2019)
"REAL stories. REAL history."
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Commodore 64 Ads from the 1980s
Computer magazine advertisements from the 1980s were just plain fantastic.
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The Vinland Map is awash in 20th-century ink
Yale conservators and conservation scientists have found that the map, once hailed as the earliest depiction of the New World, is awash in 20th-century ink.
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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC (2019)
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
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PC-86-DOS
A number of years ago, an 8″ disk containing Seattle Computer Products (SCP) 86-DOS 1.0 was successfully imaged . The newest files on the disk are dated April 30, 1981, making the disk the oldest complete release of what was soon to be known as PC DOS and MS-DOS, about a month older than a pre-release of PC DOS from…
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NEC’s Forgotten FPUs
NEC had a cross license agreement with Intel dating back to April of 1976 that allowed each company to make/sell products based on each others patents. This was particularly important in the 1970’s as having a viable ‘second source’ for your designs was considered critical for it to be viable in the market. This was…
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Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware
This series concerns a software licensing system used in a proprietary software application from circa 2004. The software was available in an unregistered trial mode with limited functionality. A free licence could be obtained by registering online with the software vendor. The software became abandonware circa 2009…
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8 Bits of history: My first game is still available on the internet
Smackeyackys excellent adventure I was somewhere around eight or nine when the 8 bit era of personal computers started getting into action....
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Corporations Are Crappy Archivists
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…