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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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A DIY Cruise Missile (2004)
I'd like to thank all those who have emailed me with their opinions, condemnations and support. The fact that I get so many emails obviously means that my goal of raising public awareness is working. Instead of answering the same questions and restating my perspectives repeatedly, I've been talked into writing a book…
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An Inside Look at the Backblaze Storage Pod Museum
Nearly 10 years after the first Storage Pod altered the storage landscape the innovation continues to deliver great returns to the market.
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CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser
This marks the beginning of a week long adventure in Geneva Switzerland at CERN, to work on a hack project.
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Reflecting on the Soul of a New Machine
Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine . Taking it off…
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A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
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The Soviet license plate game and Kolmogorov complexity
Physicist Lev Landau used to play a mental game with Soviet license plates [1]. The plates had the form of two digits, a dash, two more digits, and some letters. Rules of the game His game was to apply high school math operators to the numbers on both side of the dash so that the
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Aztec Political Thought (2013)
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
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Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
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World's oldest periodic table chart found in St. Andrews
A periodic table chart discovered at the University of St Andrews is thought to be the oldest in the world.
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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
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Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface.
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Intel 80386, part 1: Introduction
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Advanced Mac Substitute: API-level reimplementation of classic Mac OS
Advanced Mac Substitute is an API-level reimplementation of 1980s-era Mac OS. It runs 68K Mac applications in an emulator without an Apple ROM or system software .
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Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
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A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
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Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
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The Embroidered Computer
The Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.
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Michael Atiyah has died
We are very sorry to hear of the death of Michael Atiyah. Michael was a giant of mathematics. He held many positions including Savilian Professor of Geometry here in Oxford, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the founding Directorship of the Isaac Newton Institute and Chancellor of…