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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 82 posts.
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Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Learn how one of the biggest tech companies played a major role in the reason many people stopped using RSS feeds
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The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
Jungle music was found in countless games from the early 90s. This article goes over what jungle is, where it comes from, and why it was the perfect match for PlayStation & Nintendo 64 games.
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Why GitHub won
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
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Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Thomas E. Kurtz has died
CHM remembers the remarkable career and contributions of 2023 Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, who passed away on November 12, 2024.
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Moments in Chromecast's history
Take a look back at Chromecast’s history over the past 11 years — and learn about the future of streaming TV with Google.
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Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps
A lot of computing got done even before we had stacks and heaps.
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Round Rects Are Everywhere
Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.
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20 years of Google Scholar
Google Scholar celebrates two decades of breaking down barriers to academic research and making it accessible to everyone, everywhere.
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Decoding the telephony signals in Pink Floyd's 'The Wall'
I'm one of the founders at Corelatus. Our niche is telecom hardware for the E1/T1 and SDH/SONET interfaces. I work with layer 2 signalling, i.e SS7 MTP-2, ATM and frame relay, and the Erlang control system for our embedded hardware.
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How SSH port became 22 (2017)
The SSH port is 22. This is the story of how it got that port number. And practical configuration instructions.
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Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries
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On clock faces, 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
The Mystery of Numerical Notation on the Dial Plate - 4 is Expressed as IIII, not IV
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It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
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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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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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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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CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
Guest Post Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I ...
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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.
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The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
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Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.
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A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)
Among computing pioneers, Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley is one of the most celebrated for building a $3 billion empire in the 1960s with an all-female staff.
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40 years later, a game for the ZX Spectrum will be again broadcast over FM radio
Anyone who still has a working Spectrum ZX will then be able to test the game.
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Nokia made too many phones
TextQuery is a desktop app to import data file as a table, query it using SQL.
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What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine
What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine This exhibition explores the unforgettable art and satire of MAD, from its beginnings in 1952 as a popular humor comic book to its emergence as a beloved magazine that spoke truth to power and attracted generations of devoted readers