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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
The National Security Agency is withholding 90-year-old information on early American cryptanalytic efforts against Russia and the Soviet Union from a 20-year-old document on the grounds that relea…
In the spring of 2023, the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, will dedicate a retrospective exhibition to the 17th-century master Johannes Vermeer for the first time in its history. With loans from all over the world, this promises to be the largest Vermeer exhibition ever. The Rijksmuseum itself has…
When we wrapped up our recent Pwnium event, we praised the creativity of the submissions and resolved to provide write-ups on how the two e...
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking…
“It hath reached me, O King of the Age, that there dwelt in a city of the cities of China a man which was a tailor, withal a pauper, and he had one son, Alaeddin hight. Now this boy had been from h…
Today, a witch doctor practices computer arithmetic. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The scene is a remote Ethiopian village in 1940. A Farmer offers his herd of 34 goats for sale…
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
In the early 80s, Susan Kare was a pixel art pioneer at Apple. Today, she continues to dazzle.
A retrospective on MS-DOS 6.00 and my small contributions to the product.
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Previously believed to be only man-made, a natural example of a functioning gear mechanism has been discovered in a common insect - showing that evolution developed interlocking cogs long before we did.
Archaeologists discover world’s oldest wooden structure
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – January 21, 2026 – The Computer History Museum (CHM), a leader in decoding technology—its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity—announced the launch of OpenCHM, a new digital portal providing global access to its unparalleled collection. “OpenCHM is designed to inspire…
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis"
AdGuard dives into the history of ad blocking, from the very first banner on the web to present days, and we even have a peek into the future of ads and ad blockers. Let's look back together to better understand what awaits us ahead.
How is history used to support ideology? Is violence by a government against its own civilian population ever justified? Why are certain events given priority over others in history books? This les…
Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not…
