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Abel, the Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 304 posts.
272
"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
273
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth -- that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water -- but it's a myth.
274
Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
275
Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
276
Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…
277
VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
278
The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Structured Text on the Internet before the World Wide Web
279
FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
280
Building a Galaksija
Note: this is the first part of three articles about my experience building a 1980s Yugoslav 8-bit computer called the Galaksija. This part is mostly focused on the technical aspects of building this…
281
Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
282
Vision 1993
I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in…
283
Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
284
Programming with DOS Debugger (2003)
MS-DOS as well as Windows 98 come with a debugger program named DEBUG.EXE that can be used to work with assembly language instructions and machine code. In MS-DOS version 6.22, this program is named DEBUG.EXE and it is typically present at C:\DOS\DEBUG.EXE . On Windows 98, this program is usually present at…
285
The Albuquerque "Broken Arrow" Nuclear Accident
In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, on display at the Nationa…
286
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
287
David Kahn has died
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.
288
The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
289
A helicopter and boats to perform a rare ceremony at the Tower of London
Next week, a fairly rare ceremony will take place in and around the Tower of London, and it's even more special than usual this time.
290
AT&T's Hobbit Microprocessor (2023)
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
291
Why did clothing become boring?
An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn't
292
A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
293
Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
294
Porting 8-bit Sonic 2 to the TI-84 CE
If you’re here from the Cemetech or Sonic Retro threads, then you probably already know the gist of this post. I’ve ported Sonic 2 to the…
295
How to grip Bronze Age swords
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
296
Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
297
When Serial Isn't RS-232, Geocaching with the Garmin GPS 95
Connecting a Garmin GPS 95 to a Flipper Zero, the serial adventures along the way, and finding the Netherland's first Geocache.
298
The Beautiful Islands of San Serriffe (2016)
Some printers at a newspaper in the UK made a funny joke about fake islands
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Atari 520ST Review in Creative Computing – By Paul Lefebvre
The Atari 520ST was released in the US in July 1985, but because Atari did not provide magazines with pre-production models (like Commodore did with the Amiga), it took a while before magazine reviews appeared.