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Fatal Dose – Radiation Deaths linked to AECL Computer Errors (1994)
How a series of simple computer errors sabotaged a state-of-the-art medical wonder.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
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An oral history of the AIM away message
Speed up product development from ideation to launch. Align teams, break tool silos and ship what customers need in one AI-powered visual platform.
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The history of Alt+number sequences
Code pages and custom keyboard handling.
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The Lava Lamp Just Won't Quit
In the 1960s, a British nudist invented a lamp that inadvertently became the poster child for psychedelia. Thirty years later, it came back with a vengeance.
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Cartoons in Tektronix Schematics
Explore Tektronix schematic cartoons with vintageTEK. Discover hidden humorous drawings in manuals and schematics from classic Tektronix gear.
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86Box: Why Not Pentium III?
When does “preservation” in emulation become impractical?
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Amazon EC2 Beta (2006)
Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]
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How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company
Will Vinton brought clay to life with characters like the California Raisins and the Noid -- until Nike billionaire Phil Knight stepped in and bought the business for his son.
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Italian CPU – The Genesys B52 MMX
On this site you can read about thousands of processors models. And every year it is more and more difficult to write about some new (old) processors, since everything has been known for a long time. But there are also exceptions to the rule which we love to find. In 2021, I learned about one unusual processor, the…
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Web Sockets Now Available In Google Chrome
Starting in the Google Chrome developer channel release 4.0.249.0, Web Sockets are available and enabled by default. Web Sockets are "TCP f...
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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Rescuing the Compuserve Collection
Follow a dedicated team of museum professionals and others as they race to preserve an important collection in record time.
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The Eudora Email Client Source Code
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
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Why Ada isn't Popular (1998)
Rick Thorne writes: > In truth, I like Ada too. I'm a former Ada man myself, as I believe I > mentioned. There are great things about the language, and since we're all > aware of them there's no point in going into them. I also prefer Beta to > VHS. Mathew Heaney responds: This is actually a specious comparison…
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“Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition
1i1 “Xanadu ® ” and the Eternal-Flaming-X logo are registered trademarks of Project Xanadu .
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Mister Macintosh (2004)
Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner, to see what was new, and we'd usually show him whatever recent progress we made. Sometimes he'd be pissed off about something, but other times he'd be really excited about a new idea.
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Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the Digital New York Times
It started as a program to add reader usernames, but quickly became the language powering The Times’s website.
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Dev stays without pay to finish Mac Graphing Calculator as skunkworks project
Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo , and later became part of FrameMaker . Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under…
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Chrome Now Available for Mac or Linux : Hackers Only
In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux , but what...
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Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the…
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Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 years
We will be exploring the history of fears about technological unemployment.
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Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts
One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now native...
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Project Deluge: Xbox and Dreamcast
Project Deluge (Lot Page) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (List) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (Matched List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (Matched List) Discuss this release on our Discord server!
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Adventure Prototype Recovered for the C64
Cancelled & Unreleased Video Games