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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is.
I recently got to see John Harrison's sea clocks at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I recommend visiting if you get the chance. This post is about some of the interesting things I observed.
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I . By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.
A brief account of hacking the Yamaha DX9's firmware ROM to make its functionality more closely match the DX7.
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combin...
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
Or, the early history of Intel Corporation
I guess this is a review of sorts, so here's the review part: you should buy Tech by Androda's new 7MB Macintosh Portable RAM card . On my D...
Has nerd sniping gone too far?
Ed Balls Day is a bit of fun and the stuff of nonsense. It celebrates and remembers the day (28 April 2011) when British politician Ed Balls tweeted his name thinking he was entering it into a sear…
The Oh-My-God Particle
This, as I probably don’t need to tell you, is a banknote. To be specific, it’s a 10-afghani banknote printed in 2004 (my thanks to Dr Amelia Dowler of the BM for that astonishingly pre…
The main feature is fast access to a flat, 24-bit address space. Although there are many ways to retrofit a 'C02 with expanded memory, AFAIK none can touch this implementation for speed. Given any random address in the 16 megabyte space, KK can fetch that byte in 6-8 cyles. It's fast because:
The Nintendo Game Boy Color is a handheld game console that was released in 1998. It uses an audio amplifier chip to drive the internal s...
I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT Following my recent rants about computer generated effects ( here and here ), I thought it would be fun to look i...
dmr: I'm not a person who particularly had heroes when growing up.
A number of years ago, an 8″ disk containing Seattle Computer Products (SCP) 86-DOS 1.0 was successfully imaged . The newest files on the disk are dated April 30, 1981, making the disk the oldest complete release of what was soon to be known as PC DOS and MS-DOS, about a month older than a pre-release of PC DOS from…
Diving deep into how this Game Boy accessory really works
Although we were very happy with the win at Revision, we were not entirely happy with 8088 MPH as a whole. Because of the time pressure, there were some things we could not finish as well as we wan…
If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.
Sadly, I was born a couple years too late to grow up with an 8-bit home computer. (though I did use Apple IIs in elementary school.) In an attempt to compensate, and relive a childhood I never had, I've decided to design and build my own 8-bit home computer.
I was talking to a young ( The ones I find the most interesting are the ...
