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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 1,024 posts.
25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications <gerald [at] … > To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0 Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT) Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively…
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
Happy 27th birthday to the GNU Image Manipulation Program
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our…
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
You have to open the file anyway to make it useful, so why not just open the program directly?
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
See the original The Legend of Zelda as you never have before…
"It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between." - CS Lewis
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…
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 was awarded jointly to François Englert and Peter W. Higgs "for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by…
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
INTRODUCTION Visa is one of the biggest companies in the world. Cards bearing the Visa logo are used more than 340 million times every day. And the Visa brand is one of the most-recognized on the planet. Yet unlike other companies of similar size and ubiquity, few people know what Visa does, how
<a href="https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes"></a>The title of this post, you are not expected to understand this, is one of the most famous comments ever. It is in the v6 version of Unix, the mother operating system of Linux, Android,and iOS. Unix was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken…
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded jointly to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi "for the development of metal–organic frameworks"
