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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Windows Refund Day (1999)
Anyway, a few people from SVLUG , including Don Marti, Rick Moen (yes he was there ), Chris DiBona, the world famous Nick Moffitt, and Tabinda Khan, organized the Bay Area windows refund effort. Since at the Linux tea party , microsoft showed up at our meeting point to try to deter us from going to their offices in…
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Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
As we near the end of this decade, and more importantly the end of the hell that was 2020, I realised two things. First, I survived catching Covid-19, and secondly that I had a good story about the…
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Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
A list of things any decent Tolkien fan should avoid, ignore, despise and never ever share except for enlightening people they are getting it wrong. Thanks!
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A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
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IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
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Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
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What color was “Apple Beige”?
I went looking for a defining color of the personal computer era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
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The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)
In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.
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DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
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Remembering Windows 3.1 themes and user empowerment
Windows 3.1 allowed you to change all system colors to your liking. Linux been fully themeable since the 90s. OSX came along with a draconian “all blue aqua, and maybe a hint of gray”.
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Sony News Portable Workstation NWS-1250 (2020)
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
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USN AN-1 Submarine Aircraft Carrier (2018)
**US Navy SubmarineAircraft Carrier design** In the late 1950s the US Navy experimented with the concept of aircraft carrying submarines armed with jet fighters… Read More >….
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Soyuz spacecraft digital clock teardown
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
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Tiny PDP11 on an ESP32
2020 has been a weird year, for everyone around the world. In my specific case, that meant being away from my home in Shanghai, as we were in Europe at the time Covid hit and China did not make it easy to return until somewhere towards the end of the year.
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Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought
A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.
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An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
Here’s a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That’s because about 4 in 5 videos on the web today re
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Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card.
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27th International Obfuscated C Code Contest winners published
IOCCC Year 2020
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Reviving Old X Code
I've taken the week between Christmas and New Year's off this year. I didn't really have anything serious planned, just taking a break from the usual routine. As often happens, I got sucked into doing a project when I received this simple bug report Debian Bug #974011
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Opensource your abandonware (2010)
As you may know, back in 2007 I ressurected the development of GrafX2 . this old pixelart program, made only for DOS, was left out 6 years earlier by the authors, that had moved on to more modern computers. Today, graFX2 is amongst the best tool for pixelling, particularly on Linux or other alternative operating…
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50 Years of Text Games – A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon