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When did people stop being drunk all the time?
Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
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Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
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A 17th-century font in a 21st-century thesis
The original specimen of the Dutch Fell Types, their digitisation by Igino Marini, and further enhancements by Lin Yangchen as a font for thesis typesetting in LaTeX.
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In 1961 a Gallup poll showed only 33% of Americans in favor of moon landing
Today marks the 54th anniversary of the moon landing. In retrospect it has almost unanimous support and adoration in the US: pleasing the left as an example of the power of public funding and the right as a triumph of the capitalist west against the
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Enigma Crypto Transmission from KPH at 426 KHz and Shortwave
DA was a part of our KPH project from the beginning. She learned her trade at US Coast Guard master station NMC, adjacent to KPH. At NMC she earned the coveted gold lightning bolt radnoman’s insignia (there was no such thing as a radiowoman in the Coast Guard). She also acquired the salty vocabulary she needed to hold…
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Nintendo 64 Test Cart ROM
We were sent a Nintendo 64 test cartridge ROM that was dumped anonymously. Zoinkity wrote up a nice readme explaining the details which is included in the 7ZIP file we’ve uploaded to the Internet Archive for safekeeping. Download it by clicking here .
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10NES
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
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Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
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Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
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Wireshark Is 25: The email that started it all and lessons learned along the way
25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications <gerald [at] … > To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0 Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT) Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively…
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Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
The Renaissance history of automimesis, and a proposal for research
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New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
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The 90s Developer Starter Pack
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
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The Development of the C Language (1993)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
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Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor's address and data pin circuits
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
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When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?
Here’s a question for you. When did Alan Partridge first appear on television? Caveats: a) I specifically mean television. Radio is brilliant, and also outside the scope of this article. b) F…
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Top suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison hack committed suicide in 2014
When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [ SPOILER ALERT! ]…
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Going Rogue
When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it…
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Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands
Read about the demoscene joining the Dutch national intangible cultural heritage inventory, with links to the entry and safeguarding plan.
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Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
The full story of the 2021 ditching of a Boeing 737 cargo plane off Honolulu.
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Ericsson to WhatsApp: The Story of Erlang
How a programming language from Sweden powered one of the most valuable startup of the 2010s.
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My Meeting with David Bohm
June 29, 2023. Some scientists seek to clarify reality, others to mystify it. Physicist David Bohm seemed driven by both impulses. He is renowned for promoting a sensible (according to experts like Einstein, John Bell and philosopher Tim Maudlin) interpretation of quantum mechanics. But Bohm also a
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64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!
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The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...