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How grep got its name
How did grep get its name? This all starts back with ed, the original unix...
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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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Pegasus Mail, 30 Years On
Sometime in the last two weeks of 1989, I sent myself an e-mail message: I no longer have it, unfortunately — it was lost in one of many system switches or crashes that happened in those early days... But it was the first message sent by a small MS-DOS application I had written, which at the time was called "ComNet…
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Mitchell Feigenbaum, physicist who pioneered chaos theory, has died
Mitchell J. Feigenbaum , a mathematical physicist whose groundbreaking work on deterministic chaos influenced fields ranging from cardiology to cartography, died in New York City on June 30 at the age of 74. Feigenbaum was the Toyota Professor and director of the Center for Studies in Physics and Biology at…
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The Great Toilet Paper Scare of 1973 (2014)
Following a poorly-timed Johnny Carson joke in 1973, millions of Americans hoarded every toilet paper roll on the market and induced a mass hysteria.
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Visual Basic Turns 25
That’s right! Today marks the 25th (“Silver Anniversary”) since VB first debuted to the world. It seems like just yesterday I’d only been at Microsoft a little over a year when VB turned 20. Looking back at the progress of 5 years—a complete revamp of the IDE and debugger, a trove of new language features, […]
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Corporations Are Crappy Archivists
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
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The McDonalds Monopoly Fraud (2014)
From 1995 to 2001, it really was impossible to win a grand prize from McDonalds Monopoly promotion. Unless you knew "Uncle Jerry."
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Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron paved the way for AI 60 years too soon (2019)
As the Faculty of Computing and Information Science celebrates its 20th year, Frank Rosenblatt’s prescient research into artificial intelligence underscores Cornell’s pivotal role in computing history.
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Happy 50th Birthday, Ethernet
Why has Ethernet endured as a ubiquitous data framing protocol over all these years?
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How Blender started, twenty years ago
Celebrating 20 years of Blender code!
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NetHack 3.6.7
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4, 3.6.5, and 3.6.6. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security . You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.7 as soon as possible.
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NetHack 3.6.6
This release primarily corrects a security issue present in NetHack versions 3.6.1, 3.6.2, 3.6.3, 3.6.4 and 3.6.5. For details about the security issues please see https://www.nethack.org/security. You are encouraged to update to NetHack 3.6.6 as soon as possible.
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Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
This guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other…
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The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]
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The First 15 Years of PyPy – A Personal Retrospective
A few weeks ago I (=Carl Friedrich Bolz-Tereick) gave a keynote at ICOOOLPS in Amsterdam with the above title. I was very happy to have bee...
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Pixar: The Early Days A never-before-seen 1996 interview
A never-before-seen 1996 interview
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Everything I Know: Buckminster Fuller (1975)
Everything I Know During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. Jump to Sections Introduction These …
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NetHack 3.6.2
3.6.2 is a general patch release. It includes a large number of fixes to the 3.6.1 version, beyond the Windows issue fixed at the time of that release.
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Crash course to Amiga assembly programming
Updated May 10, 2021: Hey there friend! This ever-green blog is gold – just like reaktorians. If you’re reading this, you might be one of us. The30th
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The PNG image file format is now more popular than GIF
The PNG image file format has been created in 1995 as a response to some patent issues around the then-prevailing GIF format. PNG has gained popularity ever since, and it is now used on more websites than GIF.
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SJ Games vs. the Secret Service (1990)
On March 1, 1990, the offices of Steve Jackson Games, in Austin, Texas, were raided by the U.S. Secret Service as part of a nationwide investigation of data piracy. The initial news stories simply reported that the Secret Service had raided a suspected ring of hackers. Gradually, the true story emerged.
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The Canon Cat
A software design framework for humans, distilled from Jef Raskin's Humane Interface.
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Qantas ferried an engine on the wing of a 747 (2016)
When Qantas 747 VH-OJU had engine trouble in Johannesburg, VH-OJS came to the rescue ferrying a spare Rolls Royce engine from Sydney to Johannesburg for the stricken plane. We wanted to find out more, so we talked with Qantas about how they go about carrying an extra engine across the ocean. After considering its…
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Remembering the LAN (2020)
Learn more about the early days of LAN.
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The Independent Discovery of TCP/IP, by Ants
What does the Internet have in common with an ant colony? More than you might think.