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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,024 posts.

History & Retro Computing
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541

Twenty Years of RISC OS Open

On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.

542

The FPGA turns 40

This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables. From tiny…

564

The Slide Rule

At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical orbits with two foci, and then set out to prove it mathematically. 4 years and 900 pages of…