1771
A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1772
35mm cinema film and digital audio
A while ago I decided to pick up some 35mm cinema film to help me experiment with projection optics.
1773
The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
1774
Missing Darwin Notebooks Returned to Cambridge University Library
Charles Darwin’s iconic Tree of Life notebooks anonymously left in a pink gift bag, 15 months after launch of a worldwide appeal to find them
1775
“Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition
1i1 “Xanadu ® ” and the Eternal-Flaming-X logo are registered trademarks of Project Xanadu .
1776
Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...
1777
Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi
A while ago a came across an old Compaq LTE 286 laptop. When they were first released around 1989, these PCs were somewhat groundbreaking because they were the first to be compact enough to resemble the “notebook” form factor that we take for granted today. Unfortunately this particular unit was pretty much beyond…
1778
Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
1779
Why the Black MacBook Cost More
From 2006 until 2008, Apple sold one of the coolest Macs ever: the black MacBook. The black MacBook was sold alongside the more popular — and less expensive — white MacBook. The price difference between the white and black models is often brought up when discussing Apple’s various strategies around product design and…
1780
Rescuing the Compuserve Collection
Follow a dedicated team of museum professionals and others as they race to preserve an important collection in record time.
1781
1782
What made the NES so interesting?
I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interestin...
1783
Why we need Lisp machines
A personal mind dump on operating systems
1784
Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
1785
The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
1786
Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.
1787
Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
1788
The Apple-1's unusual MOS clock driver chip
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its disp...
1789
When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX
Macintosh Application Environment for Unix -- from back in 1994.
1790
Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
Aristocratic tutoring I: Explaining the decline of genius
1791
Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books
A look at three relics of a not-quite-bygone era. In picture-listicle form.
1792
Arch Linux turned 20 years old today. It was released on 11/March/2002
About Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX , a great distribution developed by Per Lidén. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades…
1793
Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combin...
1794
The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
1795
1796
I can no longer compile my first Flash game
A tale about game development and techonlogy obsolescence
1797
Notes on Nationalism (1945)
"By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'."
1798
How BART on the Golden Gate Bridge died: A new history
"A Machiavellian plot" to kill a Bay Area dream
1799
How the weak can win – A primer on protracted war
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022316 points285 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our volunteer narrator, this post is now available in audio format. This week, in an effort to fill in some of the theoretical basis for thinking about how weaker powers think about fight…
1800
My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time