1621
Mille Bornes
Edmond Dujardin, Joseph Callenac and the design history of Mille Bornes.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
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1622
Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc
11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But…
1623
Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
1624
C64 Theremin
The Theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments. It's played by moving one's hands in front of two antennas: One controls pitch and the other controls volume.
1625
Holier Than Thou: Precision Holes by Drilling, Boring, and Reaming (2021)
It’s imperative that design engineers understand the full journey of the parts they design, from the drawing definition, through manufacturing, and inspection. One of the most common features in machine design is a hole. Whether it accepts a bolt or holds a precision bearing, it has to be the right size and in the…
1626
The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
1627
Why no Roman industrial revolution?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022509 points587 commentscited by 33History & Retro Computing details
This week we are taking a look at the latest winner of the ACOUP Senate poll, which posed the question “Why didn’t the Roman Empire have an industrial revolution?” To answer that,…
1628
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
1629
A History of HTML (1998)
The events and circumstances that led to the World Wide Web's current popularity
1630
Sanyo Triple Five
Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me. Like, for instance, buying a broken super-budget PC-incompatible from 1982.
1631
The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
Disaster Relief. We saw the best of Internet users when they pulled together to help each other through several natural disasters in 1994. The year brought floods, earthquakes, and other major tragedies. Almost immediately following each of these events, Net users gathered around their terminals and formed newsgroups…
1632
“I survived the TCP transition” (2013)
This year we invited Vint Cerf to tell the story.
1633
Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…
1634
Outdoor Sound Propagation in the U.S. Civil War (1999)
Students of military history know that acoustic refraction and unusual audibility have often played significant roles in the outcome of battles. Before electrical and wireless communications became common on the tactical level, the sound of battle was often the quickest and most efficient method by which a commander…
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Book Review: 1587, a Year of No Significance
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest
1637
1638
The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
A fun, endearing, delightful pile of lies.
1639
1640
The Intel 80376 – A legacy-free i386 with a twist (2010)
25 years after the introduction of the 32 bit Intel i386 CPU, all Intel compatibles still start up (and wake up!) in 16 bit stone-age mode, and they have to be switched into 32/64 bit mode to be usable.
1641
Intel 286 secrets: ICE mode and F1 0F 04
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
1642
Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022216 points39 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the third part of a three part (I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last post, we outlined what ‘foraging’ actually e…
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1645
Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor
In case you have missed it, over the weekend, a new demo for IBM PC with CGA was released at Evoke, under the name Area 5150. It placed first in the competition, which should not surprise anyone: I…
1646
“Code” 2nd Edition Now Available
In a startling disruption of the space-time continuum — and a violation of the basic maxim of publishing that nothing is ever on time — the publication date of the 2nd edition of my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software was bumped up by 12 days. That means that the publication date is today…
1647
The First Three Discworld Games
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464 , which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word…
1648
How Did Elevators Lose Their Music?
My informal survey reveals the decline of an insipid but historic genre
1649
I assure you, medieval people bathed (2019)
I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…
1650
3Hz Computer, Hold the Transistors
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II , a mechanical digital 1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.