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Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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How Markdown took over the world
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
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Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card.
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StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
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Things Unexpectedly Named After People
Unfortunately, Rocket Lab does not seem to be named after seed investor/aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket .
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The 100 MHz 6502
A 6502 (or 65C02) in an FPGA, running at 100 MHz, ready to plug into your vintage computer
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How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
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Late Bronze Age Collapse
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026432 points316 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
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The past was not that cute
Aesthetics are not history.
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The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
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Understanding the War in Ukraine
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022429 points605 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
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Twenty-five years of curl
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…
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C++: The Documentary
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student…
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The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It’s practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my
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COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
Delving the depths of computing, hoping not to get eaten by wumpus
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Life Improvements Since the 1990s
A list of unheralded improvements to ordinary quality-of-life since the 1990s going beyond computers.
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iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
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There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
For over thirty years, a dead rabbit has hung inside Seven Sisters tube station, and thousands of people walk past it every day without noticing.