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Black currants were banned in the USA (2017)
Do you know what got black currants banned? They nearly destroyed a huge part of American forests. Find out how this healthy berry became a threat.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
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Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
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HTML5 Rocks: A resource for open web developers
Because HTML5 and its related technologies cover so much ground, it can be a real challenge to get up to speed on them. That’s why today we'...
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In Memoriam of Charles “Chuck” Peddle
It is with sadness WDC/I announce that on December 15, 2019, Chuck Peddle passed away. We send our heartfelt condolences to his family, friends and the personal computer industry. We have lost a pioneer with Chuck’s passing.
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Peter Montgomery Has Died
Peter was born in San Francisco, California, on September 25, 1947. He went to UC Berkeley in 1967 and received a BA in Mathematics in 1969 and an MA in 1971. Peter’s undergraduate advisor was Derrick H. Lehmer, an excellent match given Peter’s research interests since high school: integer factorization.
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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
Studies showed early on that kids who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs. Why did schools keep using it?
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The Price of Nails Since 1695
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
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Van Gogh’s Self-Portraits
What did Vincent van Gogh look like? His self-portraits provide a good indication. Read on to find out all about them.
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The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.
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Nvidia emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128/NV3 architecture history and overview
An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.
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Evolution of the English Alphabet
Buy the poster | Watch a video explanation
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s Self-Powered Cart (2021)
A club for Meccano enthusiasts in London, holding four meetings each year and a public Meccano Show in Falconwood.
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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early OO Programming
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
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DNS LOC Record (2014)
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.
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Debian 10.6
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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We've freed Cookie's Bustle from copyright hell
We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.
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The Applesoft Compiler (TASC): We have the source code, in a sense
The desperation of programming under tight memory constraints.