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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting
Usenet—Netnews—was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it’s important to understand the technological constraints of the time.
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The Magical Excel 97 Far East Language Build Screwdriver
For your magical build needs.
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
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“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)
"THAT DEEP ROMANTIC CHASM": LIBERTARIANISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE COMPUTER CULTURE
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Debian 10.2
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
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Instant stone (just add water) (2018)
If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!
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TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
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The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
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Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
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Those odd-looking security barriers
You've probably seen these dotted around a few places, what looks like some sort of security barrier, but wondered how such an odd thing could work.
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When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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Windows XP minimal-requirement experiments (2006)
Wettbewerb um die ultimative Mindestanforderung für Windows XP zu finden.
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
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“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
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Betrayal at Krondor
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game . These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm…
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The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2
In 2009, the W3C cancelled the development of the proposed successor of XHTML, XHTML2.
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Don Valentine has died
We help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond.
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“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
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80x25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]