Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
The pre-internet era was full of wonderful and very powerful systems that are well forgotten now, but we definitely can learn from them, try to understand why we had an enormous degradation in the 1990s and 2000s, and why we are enjoying hypertext systems renaissance now.
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we revisit a first-hand account of designing the Lunar Module digital autopilot, and compare the approach used then with the way it could be done today.
Phone numbers containing "555" are not just used for the movies, and yes, some numbers are indeed real.
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
Who really invented the alphabet? Although we are still uncertain about precisely where the world’s most influential communication system came from, we know more than we did 20 years ago.
For many, Los Angeles embodies car-culture—and the suburban-style development, freeways, traffic jams, and pollution that go with it. But it didn’t have to be that way. Turns out, LA was never designed to be a car city.
[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…
Acorn, BBC Micro and Retro Computer Code & Demos
How hundreds of thousands of Filipino soldiers fought in the U.S. military and helped win World War II. And how history -- and the American government -- forgot them.
It's amazing how a series of small but unfortunate events can quickly add up to one very expensive problem. Like the time one person fat-fingered the wrong year on a mainframe JCL job, Ronald Reagan died, and the US postal service lost $500 million.
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
Every December, I try to make a little wintery demo to exercise one of 8bitworkshop’s platforms. This year, I chose the Atari 800 to test out the new native TypeScript emulator in 8bitworkshop. You...
1100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets from 1956 on the interactive NukeMap. Choose a city and a bomb size, and detonate. See what happens.
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
Bauhaus was a german art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that transcended traditional boundaries, boldly embracing the fusion of form and function. The founder of the school, Walter Gropius, believed in the "fundamental unity of the arts" and he anticipated the challenges that 20th-ce
Students brewed an ancient beer during class with Stanford archaeologist Li Liu, who discovered evidence of earliest beer-making in China as part of her recent research.
Here is a new ZX80 clone that I have called the Minstrel. It is a fairly accurate clone electrically to the ZX80, using the same chips and ...
Hyperion Entertainment
In theory, all IP addresses are the same, and you can allocate them at random without a problem. 192.168.1.2 is certainly not better or worse than 192.168.1.15, right? But, in practice, certain IP addresses are regarded as "special" by some implementations and do not yield the same user experience.…
The right kind of bubble brings together the right group of people at the right time — it's a coordinating mechanism that can do a surprising amount of good.
Explore some of the anti-invasion defences built across England during the First and Second World Wars.
In a noisy world, it allows you to be heard.
DA was a part of our KPH project from the beginning. She learned her trade at US Coast Guard master station NMC, adjacent to KPH. At NMC she earned the coveted gold lightning bolt radnoman’s insignia (there was no such thing as a radiowoman in the Coast Guard). She also acquired the salty vocabulary she needed to hold…
Harvard celebrates the 100th anniversary of a computational principle that was little noticed in its time, but that underlies all of modern science.
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin "for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes"
