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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 72 posts.
It's been a quiet year at geminiprotocol.net thus far. I've let two "Apollo days" slip by without a word. I'm about as disappointed in myself for this as I expect many folks are unsurprised by it. I do still have plans and clear ideas for finalising the minor oustanding spec issues. I'd tell people to look forward to…
Findings resolve “steppe hypothesis” enigma
A comprehensive study of the machine-tool industry in the United States, Japan, Germany, and Italy. The study analyzed the causes of the U.S. decline and offered policy options for aiding the industry's recovery.
A never-before-seen 1996 interview
Douglas Bader was a Battle of Britain pilot unlike any other. Medically discharged against his will in 1932, the outbreak of the war was an opportunity for Bader to re-join the RAF and take back to the skies.
This is the mail archive of the gcc@gcc.gnu.org mailing list for the GCC project .
This year marks the 40th anniversary of one of the most exciting and interesting aspects of electronic engineering: the FPGA. The first commercially viable FPGA introduced in 1985 was the Xilinx XC2064, which provided developers with 64 configurable logic blocks, each with a three-input look-up tables. From tiny…
The first project that I worked on for Apple after starting in August 1979 was writing low level software for the Silentype printer (see What Hath Woz Wrought ) , a cute, inexpensive thermal printer for the Apple II, that was based on technology licensed from a local company named Trendcom. In typical Apple fashion…
Classic game mods and resources
The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering and Manufacturing. A "Brief" History of CAD by David E. Weisberg
When entertaining the idea of communities issuing their own money (called complementary currencies ), people often wonder if that idea has been successfully done before. In doing our research into the concept, we encountered a number of stories where communities issued their own currency and produced a prosperity…
The emerging importance of the find underscores a key truth about archaeology: artifacts often hold secrets that only later generations can unlock.
The death rate per mile driven has declined 22-fold since 1950.
AN EXTREMELY RARE “MEGALOGRAPHY” OF THE 1ST CENTURY BC, LIKE THE FAMOUS VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES Over 100 years since the discovery of the Villa of the Mysteries, a large … keep it going
Interactive visualization of the history of the latin alphabet, showing the temporal and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces to each other
An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.
One little used type of DNS record is the LOC (or location). It allows you to specify a physical location. CloudFlare handles millions of DNS records; of those just 743 are LOCs. Nevertheless, it's possible to set up a LOC record in the CloudFlare DNS editor.
Anti-Tutsi articles and graphic cartoons began appearing in the Kangura newspaper from around 1990. In June 1993 a new radio station called Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting in Rwanda…
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2025!
Oh look what you just made there.
Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from the 1200s discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 was awarded "for having explained innovation-driven economic growth" with one half to Joel Mokyr "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" and the other half jointly to Philippe Aghion…
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music.
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.
Researchers at Nordita at Stockholm University have analyzed flashes of light on astronomical plates from the early 1950s and found statistical connections between the times of these flashes, nuclear weapons tests and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The results are presented in two studies published…
On 9 July 1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics
Explore Tektronix equipment in films and TV at vintageTEK. Find detailed screenshots and IDs of scopes, probes, and monitors from 1953–1984.
