Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,253 posts.

History & Retro Computing
Any year
4023

Implementing VisiCalc (2003)

I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…

4027

PC-86-DOS

A number of years ago, an 8″ disk containing Seattle Computer Products (SCP) 86-DOS 1.0 was successfully imaged . The newest files on the disk are dated April 30, 1981, making the disk the oldest complete release of what was soon to be known as PC DOS and MS-DOS, about a month older than a pre-release of PC DOS from…

4039

Windows-NT vs. CP/M

Microsoft has come out with a number of benchmarks and comparison papers championing the fact that Windows-NT is much better than Linux. I find such comparisons fascinating, but rather than rehash this argument, I've decided to create my own comparison. Not of Windows-NT vs. Linux, that's been done. But of Windows-NT…

4045

The Emacs Problem (2005)

The Emacs Problem Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants™ Charles G. pointed out in an email discussion recently: Lisp still doesn't seem like the right language for doing text manipulation, and nothing I've seen from the Emacs libraries is making me think any differently. It sure beats the hell out of Java

4050

The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized

A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. Provided for historical interest only. The diagrams are a bit dotty, but available in versioins linked below. The text has not been changed, even…