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Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 82 posts.
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
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Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Explore Claude Fable 5.1's proposed solution to Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a centuries-old cipher, with the reasoning behind the result.
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Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
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Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into watching something else than you intended to. The usual scenario ends up with the kid feeling disempowered and asking an adult to put something on. That…
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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
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Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
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Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s....
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A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
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NetHack 5.0.0
NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
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The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
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All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?
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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
How a specification surfaced a defect in the Apollo flight code.
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
100% cotton paper. 100% crazy.
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Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
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Twenty Years of Pandoc
A universal document converter
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Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.
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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
I want to speak to your manager.
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What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
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Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended. Every Windows 95 box has an anti-piracy hologram on the side. The photographer chose his
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Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
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Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran : High-performance parallel programming language
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 was awarded jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
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The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable
The medal and the diploma are the physical symbols confirming that an individual or organisation has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
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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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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.