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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 69 posts.
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Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
"Demoskene is an international community focused on demos, programming, graphics and sound creatively real-time audiovisual performances. [..] Subculture is an empowering and important part of identity for its members."
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Frances Allen has died
The IBM Research blog is the home for stories told by the researchers, scientists, and engineers inventing What’s Next in science and technology.
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before - with simple files written in HTML that could…
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Gimp is 25 years old today
Exactly 25 years ago, Peter Mattis wrote a message to several newsgroups announcing a new image editor called GIMP.
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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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25 Years of PHP
Celebrate the PHP anniversary with JetBrains! Follow the timeline of the pivotal moments in PHP history.
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Thank You for 20 Years of Discogs
Discogs Digs is the place to start your journey of music discovery. Explore recommendations, unique stories, guides, and more.
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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead
The history of defect tracking databases in Windows.
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Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online
Op 8 juli 2019 start het Rijksmuseum Operatie Nachtwacht, het grootste en meest veelzijdige onderzoeks- en restauratieproject van Rembrandts meesterwerk in de geschiedenis. Operatie Nachtwacht heeft tot doel het schilderij optimaal te behouden voor de toekomst.
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Emacs: The most successful malleable system
Emacs is probably the most successful malleable system in the history of computing. What can we learn from it for designing the malleable systems of the future?
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Racket is 25
posted by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt The First Thoughts [Matthias]: Wednesday 25 January 1995: POPL used to be a Monday-through-Wednesday-noon affair. Cormac Flanagan presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate i...
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
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…
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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
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?
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/* You Are Not Expected to Understand This */ (2018)
<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…
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The oldest company in almost every country (that is still in business)
To survive in the big bad world of business, you need staying power. We wanted to know which businesses around the world have stood the test of time and were
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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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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The History of the URL
January 11th, 1982, 22 computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).
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Sega VR Revived: Emulating an Unreleased Genesis Accessory
We managed to virtualize Sega’s virtual reality headset without ever touching the hardware!
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing"
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The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird Internet history
Check out our file conversion API – convert 100s of formats with just a few lines of code. In a special series Zamzar take a look at some of the people who have helped shape technology and made it… Read More Jason Scott
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Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks
Resurrecting Days of Thunder from dying floppy disks took tenacity...and a little bit of luck.
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Emojis paved the way for UTF-8 everywhere
Web developers rarely need to think to think about character sets in the modern world thanks to UTF-8. I made the journey from character hell to emoji nirvan...
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Google Wave’s failure is a lesson for modern real-time collaboration tools
Google Wave debuted at I/O in May 2009 and shut down in April 2012. What happened, why it failed, and how its real-time engine still powers editors.
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The Legend of GayBlade
The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as "Dungeons and Drag Queens". Once thought to…
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