2611
A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2612
The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
2613
Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...
2614
Things to Know About GNU Readline
What is GNU Readline and where did it come from?
2615
An oral history of the AIM away message
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2616
A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
A vision of an OS that recognizes that any user activity and most of the system activities are nothing but queries, which ought to be treated uniformly and implemented efficiently once and for all; database as a file system; A paper submitted to MacHack'95
2617
I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
2618
Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
This post recaps some of the C64 coding tricks used in my little Commodore 64 coding competition . The competition rules were simple: make a C64 executable (PRG) that draws two lines to form the below image. The objective was to do this in as few bytes as possible.
2619
Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…
2620
“Bicycle of the Mind”
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
2621
Building a vacuum tube computer
Having 32 (31) registers, this means that a refresh will be issued each 256us. To be on the safe side, the capacitor should keep its charge much longer than that. Testing with both EAA91 (ideal diode) and some semiconductors: Diode charge hold time Comment EAA91 >500us ideal diode 1N4148 >500us for reference, leakage…
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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Commodore 900
Click the Commodore icon to return. Intending to use pictures or text from this page? Please read this notice . Last modify 11 August 2020.
2624
Cartoons in Tektronix Schematics
Explore Tektronix schematic cartoons with vintageTEK. Discover hidden humorous drawings in manuals and schematics from classic Tektronix gear.
2625
Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
2626
Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
2627
Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
2628
A History of Visa
INTRODUCTION Visa is one of the biggest companies in the world. Cards bearing the Visa logo are used more than 340 million times every day. And the Visa brand is one of the most-recognized on the planet. Yet unlike other companies of similar size and ubiquity, few people know what Visa does, how
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Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
2631
Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
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A moonlit tribute to a moon landing icon
As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, we honor Margaret Hamilton’s contribution with a portrait made of moonlight.
2634
The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we revisit a first-hand account of designing the Lunar Module digital autopilot, and compare the approach used then with the way it could be done today.
2635
Powering a Mainframe
The last few days have been eventful. I was contacted by the datacenter that the mainframe's cage is now ready for moving in, and the power ...
2636
Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
2637
Why airplane windows have round corners (2016)
It's to prevent them from killing you
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Thaddeus Kosciusko
So, we know all about the heroes of the American Revolution, right? George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere – OK, well, not him, he was a good silversmith, an average errand rider, and a godawfu…
2640
Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
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