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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
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The girl with the ANSI tattoo
I enjoyed the David Fincher remake of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo more than I thought I would. Rather than a shallow and cynical Holly...
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Lode Runner
It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented…
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A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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I assure you, medieval people bathed (2019)
I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…
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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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The sound of the dialup, pictured
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
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How transportation technologies shaped empires
For thousands of years, a hidden rule limited the size of empires, unbeknownst to their rulers.
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Ten Years of ThinkPadding
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
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The Insane Innovation of TI Calculator Hobbyists
In the mid-to-late 2000s, you either knew, or were, that kid in grade school. You know. The one who could put games on your graphing calculator. You may be surprised to learn that some of these people didn’t exist totally in a vaccuum. There was in fact a thriving scene of hackers who had bent these calculators to…
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Apple gold
Another great post
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1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
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Tough times on the road to Starcraft
The road to StarCraft was a brutal sequence of bad breaks, hard pivots, and near-disasters. This is the part most people never heard.
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.
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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
On Dec. 20, 1996, Apple announced that it had purchased NeXT: Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
A generation of technology workers grew up using it
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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…
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Why do long options start with two dashes? (2019)
Around 1990, Richard Stallman (RMS) and I were writing the GNU C library getopt() and he wanted to extend it to support long (multi-character) option names for user-friendliness. He considered Unix…
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Using machine learning to recreate photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors
Artistic interpretations of the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate, created with AI and historical references.
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Turing Oversold?
It is not the fault of Turing, though.
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally