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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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Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux
Won’t be big Thirty years ago today, Linus Torvalds announced his free operating system to the world. As with many of the world’s greatest, Linux had humble beginnings as a very small pet project. The GNU was working on an ambitious free, public domain operating system but the project had been delayed, and enthusiasts…
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Porsche: The Hedge Fund That Also Made Cars
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
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Thousand year-old windmills in Iran (2017)
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Cleve Moler has died
Jack Little and Cleve Moler, cofounders of MathWorks, recognized the need among engineers and scientists for more powerful and productive computation environments beyond those provided by languages such as Fortran and C. In response to that need, they combined their expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer…
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Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?
In 1250, the southeastern United States was home to a city larger than London whose people built 200 huge, earthen pyramids. So why do so few people know about it?
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CRPG Book Released
Four years ago I began a journey. On Feb 5 2014 I posted the results of the RPG Codex’s Top 70 poll, in which we elected the best CRPGs of all time. But I felt that a simple list was too dry&…
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidankyo
The Nobel Peace Prize 2024 was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again"
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1800s Astronomical Drawings vs. NASA Images (2016)
Comparing astrological drawings from our Digital Collections to NASA images—how similar do you think they are?
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1961 The books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth, the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after…
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Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)
Our project to preserve the history of Sega Channel — including over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs.
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Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
The humble Suica card was developed in the 90’s and has kept Japan moving for almost three decades. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
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Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim
The history of Vi & Vim goes hand in hand with the history of open-source software. This article looks at the historical events that shaped the evolution of these text editors.
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The Objects of Our Life (1983)
Exclusive video footage of Steve Jobs talking about his design vision and philosophy and how design worked at Apple.
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The RIAA vs. Steve Jobs
We had no idea how close we came to being crushed.
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25 Years of Dillo
Back in 1999, a group of developers lead by Jorge Arellano Cid forked the Gzilla/Armadillo code originally developed by Raph Levien, and began working on what is now known as the Dillo web browser.
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Don Valentine has died
We help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond.
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Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies
Or, how we lose knowledge and technologies. And what we can do about it.
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Forensic Ballistics: How Apollo 12 Helped Solve the Skydiver Meteorite Mystery
What can a 45-year-old mission to the Moon tell us about a
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The Invention of the AeroPress
How one inventor went from making Frisbees to one of the world's best coffeemakers.
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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
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Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1a Source Code (2014)
The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran.
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