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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
242
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
243
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
244
How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
How a specification surfaced a defect in the Apollo flight code.
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The Technocracy Movement of the 1930s
The dreams of a forgotten movement from the 1930s live on
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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…
248
Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older one
A very primitive version of recovery.
249
The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
250
Bring Back MiniDV with This Raspberry Pi FireWire Hat
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used…
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What major works of literature were written after age of 85? 75? 65?
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
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Researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals textile revolution
UA researchers find 3,500-year-old loom that reveals key aspects of textile revolution in the Bronze Age
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OpenBSD on Motorola 88000 Processors
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
254
John Bradley, author of xv, has died
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026608 points963 commentscited by 7History & Retro Computing details
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
257
What came after the 486?
Changing from part numbers had benefits for Intel, but it took time
258
The IBM scientist who rewrote the rules of information just won a Turing Award
What started as a conversation on the beach between two scientists led to the “Nobel Prize in computing“ decades later. More on Charles Bennet, co-recipient of the 2025 Turing Award.
259
Ju Ci: The Art of Repairing Porcelain
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
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Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s....
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Celebrating Tony Hoare's mark on computer science
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
262
The paddle wheel aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan
You’ve read the title. Aircraft carriers of where powered by what? I was just as surprised as you are, but yes, they really did exist. I now introduce you to USS Wolverine and USS Sable:
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VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
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Write up of my homebrew CPU build
The blog of an engineer from Canada
265
LotusNotes
I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and…
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Tony Hoare has died
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGO...
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Tony Hoare has died
Limousin, Saint-Yrieix-la-perche, Périgord, Université, société, Livres, citations, Nantes, Jumilhac
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Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
Repairing a dead power supply and replacing the NVRAM in a vintage UNIX workstation.
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Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.