961
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
962
Starting FORTH (1981)
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
963
The outside investigation of SoftRAM 95 (2021)
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
964
965
966
Flowers for Turing
Alan Turing, the pioneering Computer Scientist and World War II codebreaker, has a statue in Sackville Gardens in Manchester. On 23rd June each year, we surround it with flowers in his memory for his birthday.
967
968
Museum of Digital Art forced to close its doors
It is with a heavy heart that the Museum of Digital Art announces today the untimely closure of its location in Zurich at the end of July 2020. After four years of successful growth, Europe’s first physical museum dedicated to digital art was hit hard by the Covid19 lockdown, as it runs without any public funding…
969
NetBSD turns 20
On this page you will find a summary of significant changes to NetBSD. For those interested in every change to the source tree, there is no substitute for subscribing to the source-changes mailing list. Significant news related to the NetBSD Project is also included here. Changes to pkgsrc are also listed here. All of…
970
971
Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client ...
972
Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
973
974
The Invention of Sliced Bread
Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.
975
In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to…
976
977
978
MacPaint and QuickDraw 1984 source code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
979
980
2010 Physics Nobel Prize (Graphene)
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2010 was awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"
981
The original proposal of the WWW, HTMLized
A hand conversion to HTML of the original MacWord (or Word for Mac?) document written in March 1989 and later redistributed unchanged apart from the date added in May 1990. Provided for historical interest only. The diagrams are a bit dotty, but available in versioins linked below. The text has not been changed, even…
982
983
Chrome will use gpu to render pages
For some time now, there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system. New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS tr...
984
2010 Nobel Prize for Peace Awarded to Liu Xiaobo
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
985
MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
986
How a WWII Jet Fighter Was Designed in 150 days & shipped in six months
Quick prototypes. Small teams. No bureaucracy. No lengthy documentation. Limited meetings. A Skunk Works approach to design. They were all essential to Clarence (“Kelly”) Johnson’s process for creating some of the most remarkable planes of the past century, including the Lockheed …
987
Chrome Dev build comes with Flash 10.1 beta "integrated"
Adobe Flash Player is the most widely used web browser plug-in. It enables a wide range of applications and content on the Internet, from g...
988
989
990
Hacker builds working 1/10th scale Cray 1
No hackerspace is complete without it's own rockin' supercomputer - and when a Gibson isn't available, a Cray-1 will have to do. My 1/10-scale,