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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
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Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
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Tim Berners-Lee wins Turing Award
MIT Professor Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, has won the Association for Computing Machinery's A.M. Turing Award. Often referred to as “the Nobel Prize of computing,” the award comes with a $1 million prize provided by Google.
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
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In Memoriam: Ian Murdock
Docker is a founding member of the Blueprint Alliance, a 12-company reference architecture for securing AI agents, built around four governance questions.
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Hello Firefox, this is Chrome calling
For the first time, Chrome and Firefox can “talk” to each other via WebRTC . WebRTC is a new set of technologies that brings clear crisp voi...
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Do svidaniya, Igor, and thank you for Nginx
With profound gratitude for his contributions to both F5 and the Internet at large, we announce that Igor Sysoev, author of NGINX and co-founder of NGINX, Inc., is retiring to spend time with friends and family and work on personal projects. Спасибо, Игорь.
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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
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Lorinda Cherry, author of dc, bc, eqn has died
Aisha Washington is a global people and culture executive with more than two decades of experience driving enterprise growth through HR M&A integration, workforce AI transformation, high-performance culture, and team
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Google open-sources the Pebble OS
The source code for the Pebble operating system in now open, to support the volunteer community maintaining Pebble watches.
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Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Explore Claude Fable 5.1's proposed solution to Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a centuries-old cipher, with the reasoning behind the result.
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Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
"Demoskene is an international community focused on demos, programming, graphics and sound creatively real-time audiovisual performances. [..] Subculture is an empowering and important part of identity for its members."
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Doug Engelbart has died
Search IETF mail list archives
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First word discovered in unopened Herculaneum scroll by CS student
Vesuvius Challenge \$700,000 Grand Prize “now definitely achievable”
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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany. Big push for other national Demoscene applications and the acceptance for an understanding of digital cultures in general
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Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
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How SSH got port number 22
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
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Debian 13 “Trixie”
After 2 years, 1 month, and 30 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 13 (code name trixie ).
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Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Learn how one of the biggest tech companies played a major role in the reason many people stopped using RSS feeds
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Frances Allen has died
The IBM Research blog is the home for stories told by the researchers, scientists, and engineers inventing What’s Next in science and technology.
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The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano?
It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that…
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Bidding farewell to Google Code
The latest news from Google on open source releases, major projects, events, and outreach programs for early career developers.
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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in The Netherlands
Read about the demoscene joining the Dutch national intangible cultural heritage inventory, with links to the entry and safeguarding plan.
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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
Explore Plan 9, Bell Labs' innovative operating system. Discover its impact on distributed computing, network-centric design, and modern OS development.
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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
The A.M. Turing Award, ACM's most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.
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What’s wrong with medieval pigs in videogames
Some medieval videogames claim historical authenticity, but one particular farm animal is often overlooked...