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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,228 posts.
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Ken Thompson's Unix Password
Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.
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Tony Hoare has died
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGO...
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Bill Atkinson has died
Link to: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&id=1378467145&_rdr
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They Used To Last 50 Years
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
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As I retire, my goal now is to release 40+ years of source code
Dunfield Development Services
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From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
The one email I ever got from Steve Jobs, and it said …
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I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
40 years later and the art people painstaking made in MacPaint on their little Macs still amazes me.
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Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
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Hacker News Parody Thread (2013)
This page is intended to be a humorous parody of Hacker News . It is not in any way affiliated with Hacker News. The page's theme and layout are based on the original site. The usernames (with two exceptions) are intended to be fictitious.
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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
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“Code” 2nd Edition
I am overjoyed to announce that the 2nd edition of my book Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software will be published by Pearson on August 19, 2022. As you can see, the covers of the two editions are nearly identical except that the 2nd edition uses the “dark mode” option:
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The Mystery of the Bloomfield Bridge
This pedestrian bridge crosses I-494 just west of the Minneapolis Airport . It connects Bloomington to Richfield. I drive under it often and I wondered: why is it there? It's not in an area that is particularly walkable, and it doesn't connect any establishments that obviously need to be connected. So why was it built?
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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
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Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …
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Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Web Design: The First 100 Years (2014)
This is the expanded version of a talk I gave on September 9, 2014 , at the HOW Interactive Design conference in Washington, DC.
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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
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My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Published: 15-06-2023 01:30 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day , I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
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A forged Apple employee badge
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
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Why I Quit Being So Accommodating (1922)
Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. A very odd essay from a 1922 issue of The American Magazine that seems to go against the general grain of most of the articles…
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What not to write on your security clearance form (1988)
Date: 01 Apr 88 1620 PST From: Les Earnest < LES...@S... > Subject: The "previous account" referred to in RISKS-6.51
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An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks