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File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink
Fun with LapLink 5 and parallel port file transfers under FreeDOS
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
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A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge
There are thousands of books in print today about starting a business, but only a handful about ending one and moving on . Tamburri2020 is a deep dive into one particular (and not yet complete) ending: the decline of SourceForge , which was the first (and for many years the largest) open source software forge. Over…
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What was a Token Ring network?
Token Ring and ARCNET once competed with Ethernet as networking standards
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dBase: 1979-2026
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
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History of Emacs and vi Keys (2010)
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
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Google Chrome for Linux goes stable
Since the initial beta release of Google Chrome for Linux last December , we've been hard at work adding the polish necessary to upgrade th...
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The Future That Never Was
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
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Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)
The 80’s was a decade of many things — excess, greed, and big hair, to name a few — but it was also the heyday for airbrush art. As a teenager in the late 80’s, I desperately wanted an airbrush so I could paint my favorite band logos on the back of my jean jacket, and maybe make some money on the side painting…
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The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024130 points62 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
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Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro
In 1981, the BBC set out to educate Great Britain about computers. It did a really good job.
2922
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
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Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
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We'll buy back your Typewriter for Uncle Sam
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
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War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020130 points49 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants. Last time (here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so power…
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Man, Myth and Magic
Collect the set! I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagin…
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South Korean President Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
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Decoding the 90s: Cryptography in Early Software Development (2023)
In August 2020 we were commissioned to recover a cache of locked QText documents from the mid-90s. This is the process of analyzing the encrypted documents and reverse engineering a DOS-era Hebrew-English word processor written in Turbo Pascal.
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The Sega Master System
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
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The Color of the Future: A history of blue
A history of blue 🦋
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JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
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Google's "Chrome Frame" plugin for IE no longer requires admin rights
We released Google Chrome Frame in September 2009 to expand the reach of modern web technologies and help developers take advantage of HTML...
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Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…