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Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
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Google Removing H.264 Support in Chrome
The web’s open and community-driven development model is a key factor in its rapid evolution and ubiquitous adoption. The WebM Project was ...
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Happy 20th Birthday, Django
Posted by Thibaud Colas & Benjamin Balder Bach on July 13, 2025
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Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s....
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A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
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History of the browser user-agent string (2008)
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!
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-2000 Lines of code (2004)
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
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The cats sitting on a fence in early builds of Windows 8
Something to look at when all is lost.
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NetHack 5.0.0
NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
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New study reveals most classic video games are unavailable
New study reveals most classic video games are completely unavailable
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Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
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The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"
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Pentagon and CIA shaped thousands of Hollywood movies into effective propaganda
Propaganda is most impactful when people don't think it's propaganda, and most decisive when it's censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived.
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108B Pixel Scan of Johannes Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring
Girl with a Pearl Earring
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Nobel Prize in Physics 2025
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025 was awarded jointly to John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret and John M. Martinis "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit"
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Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps
A lot of computing got done even before we had stacks and heaps.
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We Are Now In Command of the ISEE-3 Spacecraft
The ISEE-3 Reboot Project is pleased to announce that our team has established two-way communication with the ISEE-3 spacecraft and has begun commanding it to perform specific functions. Over the coming days and weeks our team will make an assessment of the spacecraft’s overall health and refine the techniques…
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The historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games
This blog post explores the historical accuracy of medieval city-builder video games.
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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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A prank cursor resulted in an employee being fired before they started (2020)
Don't try this at home.
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Joining Apple Computer (2018)
40 years ago today, I joined Apple Computer on April 27, 1978. It was a big turning point in my life and I am glad I said "Yes".
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25 Years of PHP
Celebrate the PHP anniversary with JetBrains! Follow the timeline of the pivotal moments in PHP history.
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After a ten-year hiatus, NetHack 3.6
Unlike previous releases, which focused on the general game fixes, this release consists of a series of foundational changes in the team, underlying infrastructure and changes to the approach to game development.
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Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps
The military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished until 2006.
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The “Million Dollar Homepage” as a Decaying Digital Artifact
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.