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Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany
Demoscene accepted as UNESCO cultural heritage in Germany. Big push for other national Demoscene applications and the acceptance for an understanding of digital cultures in general
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 74 posts.
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The Alexander: Why did you build such a long piano?
It occurred to me that long bass strings sounded better. When I was 14 I asked my piano teacher how long a bass a string would need to be if it had no copper on it at all. The answer was “Adrian the string would be so long it would go on for ever!” so with this in mind I did an experiment where I could find that…
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Plan 9 from Bell Labs in Cyberspace
Explore Plan 9, Bell Labs' innovative operating system. Discover its impact on distributed computing, network-centric design, and modern OS development.
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The solution of the Zodiac killer’s 340-character cipher
See how Mathematica was used to solve one of the cryptograms sent in a letter by the Zodiac Killer.
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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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FTP is 50 years old
FTP was first published the 16th of April 1971
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Why are hyperlinks blue?
The internet has ingrained itself into every aspect of our lives, but there’s one aspect of the digital world that I bet you take for granted. Did you ev
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Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
You have to open the file anyway to make it useful, so why not just open the program directly?
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Students flee field as computer 'fad fades' (1987)
Fears about old things when they were new. Click to read Pessimists Archive Newsletter, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
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A Prototype Original iPod
Now, when we look back, we can pretty clearly see that the iPod was the genesis of a totally different kind of Apple — an Apple willing to enter new markets and make the best version of that new thing. Sure, Apple had made other things before ( QuickTake ! PowerCD !) but they never really felt committed to those…
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An Invisible Tax on the Web: Video Codecs (2018)
Here’s a surprising fact: It costs money to watch video online, even on free sites like YouTube. That’s because about 4 in 5 videos on the web today re
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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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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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Kropotkin escapes from prison
On the occasion of Peter Kropotkin's birthday, we present an account of his escape from prison in Tsarist Russia.
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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
The Greek researcher and storyteller Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fifth century BCE) was the world's first historian. In The Histories , he describes the expansion of the Achaemenid empire under its kings Cyrus the Great , Cambyses and Darius I the Great , culminating in king Xerxes ' expedition in 480 BCE against the…
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems" with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and the other half…
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Amazon EC2-Classic Is Retiring
Update (August 23, 2023) – The retirement announced in this blog post is now complete. There are no more EC2 instances running with EC2-Classic networking. Update (July 29, 2021) – Added link to the Support Automation Workflow document & clarified link to AWS MGN pricing. Also updated the list of recommended instance…
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30 years on from introducing the Web to the World
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
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Nintendo DS-TV-Out Restoration Project
How Instagram helps gamers build authority, attract sponsors, and grow a loyal community beyond the game.
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Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
Alan Kay — “father of personal computers" — is best known for his work on personal computing and for leading the team that developed Smalltalk.
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OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
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A brief history of router architecture
Here's what we've learnt about networks and the routers that interconnect them in the last 50 years.
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27th International Obfuscated C Code Contest winners published
IOCCC Year 2020
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The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)
In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.
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Philippine ethnic group has most Denisovan DNA
The Philippine ethnic group Ayta Magbukon has the highest proportion of genes from our extinct relatives, the Denisovans, a new study led by Uppsala University shows. Their Denisovan share far exceeds that of ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, who previously held the record. The study is published in the scientific…
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The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)
21 November 2020 The story goes that all spiral* staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. It is a particular favourite of tour guides, appears in castle guidebooks (Hodgson…