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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 82 posts.
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.
FOR more than three hours on a fine, calm August morning in 1955, the eyes of Sydney’s suburbia were fixed skyward, anxiously watching the flight of a pilotless Auster aeroplane
Halla Rempt Twenty-five years. A quarter century. That's how long we've been working on Krita. Well, what would become Krita. It started out as KImageShop, but that name was nuked by a now long-dead German lawyer. Then it was renamed to Krayon, and that name was also nuked. Then it was renamed to Krita, and that name…
CHM remembers Fellow Don Bitzer, computer pioneer who co-invented the flat-panel plasma display and was called the "father of PLATO.”
The MV Ruby, a ship carrying a highly explosive Russian cargo, is damaged and looking for a port. The threat is clear.
Hello! If you’re still here reading this blog, I’m impressed. We haven’t posted anything of note for some years now and frankly, thats because we haven’t done anything of note with the project. The machines have been sitting in their home, virtually untouched, for 4 years now. Chris & I (Adam) are just too busy with…
Learn more about the early days of LAN.
By Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, co-authors A MIND AT PLAY: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age “Do you mind if I hang you upside down by your legs?” From any other professor, this question might have elicited concern. But from Claude Shannon, it was par for the course. Shannon had in mind an elaborate…
It basically falls under the de minimis rule.
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
Want to know more about a tool in our web archiving toolbox? Your suggestions or questions for future posts about Archive-It technology are very welcome here .
This week brings sad news for our Duxbury Systems family. Our colleague, David Holladay, passed away in a hospital on Thursday, February 15th, following an accident at home that morning. David was a cancer survivor and valiantly battled multiple medical problems over his last five years.
After 40 years, the Atari 2600 masterpiece Tarzan has been unearthed.
This post covers the design and creation of the Floppy8, a microcomputer and cartridge system which fits inside a floppy drive. To see it in action, checkout this video! The Floppy8 plays 4K movies and games on custom cartridges, features wireless controllers, status lights, motorized cartridge ejection and more! Simil
A previously lost cache of celebrity and historical interviews from a long-dormant radio show have been discovered, digitized, and made available for all. The Internet Archive is now home to 53 episodes of The Famous Computer Cafe, a 1980s radio show about the new world of home computers. The program included computer…
The origin of the term is credited to Dr Gary L. Henderson, of the University of California at Davis. A designer drug is based on the structure of an existing drug – which may be naturally sourced from a plant (like cocaine or morphine ) or be synthetic (like amphetamine ) - but with a slightly different structure…
Techniques developed to analyse the ripples in spacetime detected by one of the 21st century’s most sensitive pieces of scientific equipment have helped cast new light on the function of the oldest known analogue computer.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2024 was awarded jointly to Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun "for the discovery of microRNA and its role in post-transcriptional gene regulation"
Fossils of a new group of animal predators have been located in the Early Cambrian Sirius Passet fossil locality in North Greenland. These large worms may be some of the earliest carnivorous animals to have colonised the water column more than 518 million years ago, revealing a past dynasty of predators that…
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
From an idea in 1966 to a patent in 1968, DRAM has had an outsized impact on the world with its dynamic random access memory technology enabling everything from mobile phones to automobiles. Cheers to 50+ years of innovation!
