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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
What started as a conversation on the beach between two scientists led to the “Nobel Prize in computing“ decades later. More on Charles Bennet, co-recipient of the 2025 Turing Award.
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955 The End of Eternity, The Body Snatchers, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It, Rebel Without a Cause, Lady and the Tramp, To Catch A Thief, Picasso’s Don Quixote, […]
New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text. The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated…
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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…
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…
(((It's very clear that the postal system is not a dead medium. However, the physical and economic structure of the posts has undergone profound, elaborate changes over the centuries. Early postal systems often doubled as espionage networks, and were often proverbially corrupt.
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2025!
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
During World War II, STEINWAY AND SONS produced specially-built pianos for the American troops. Called the Victory Vertical or G.I. Steinways, the pianos were sometimes airdropped onto battlefields to provide a bit of relaxation...
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
Independent security journalism: news and analysis on intrusions, vulnerabilities, AI, policy and the software supply chain, plus video and podcasts.
In celebration of Unix’s 50th anniversary, the CHM Software History Center is delighted to make publicly accessible for the first time some of the earliest source code produced in the Unix story.
For 40 years, Costco has succeeded with a simple formula: reinvest merchandising profits into lower prices and better products; be a disciplined operator; and treat customers and employees well. But with greater share of shopping moving online, it’s fair to wonder if the company's best da
There has been a lot of discussion regarding this week’s announcement of upcoming changes to HTML video codec support in Chrome. The future...
From French arms to French fleets, how France changed the tides of the American Revolution
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Researchers at the Rijksmuseum have demonstrated that the painting Vision of Zacharias in the Temple (1633) was made by Rembrandt. They examined the work with the same advanced techniques used in Operation Night Watch , and closely compared it with other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period. Materials analysis…
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
It is striking that this part of Japan houses two sets of structures, both of nearly equal age, and both made of largely ephemeral materials that have lasted over 14 centuries through totally different mechanisms and religions.
