1921
Office 2000 is good to go
The biggest competition for Office 2000 was…Office 97. –Realization at the end of the project
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
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1922
1923
Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became "one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular mu...
1924
How many people have Q Clearance?
Ever wonder how many people currently have the enigmatic Q Clearance, the required security clearance for access to nuclear secrets? Well, I found out.
1925
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
1926
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
1927
1928
1929
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
1930
A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air […]
1931
The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.
1932
Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
1933
An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
1934
Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021119 points14 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the first part of a planned five-part series (I, II, III, IV, V) covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss …
1935
1936
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021
Published: 28-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
1937
SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
My personal website and blog
1938
Live Not by Lies (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
1939
Pentium on a 386 Motherboard
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…
1940
An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
1941
Unusual Locomotives
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
1942
OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
1943
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web
1944
Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)
Can history help us make sense of the term 'RESTful API'?
1945
A Prototype Original iPod
Now, when we look back, we can pretty clearly see that the iPod was the genesis of a totally different kind of Apple — an Apple willing to enter new markets and make the best version of that new thing. Sure, Apple had made other things before ( QuickTake ! PowerCD !) but they never really felt committed to those…
1946
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person…
1947
Interview with Frank Herbert and His Wife Beverly Herbert (1969)
INTERVIEW BETWEEN: ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� DATE OF TAPE:
1948
Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
1949
Playstation 3 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
1950
A talk with Walter Bright about Empire
Our discussion on the creation of the great-granddaddy of all computer wargames