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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
curl turns 25 years old and what better way to celebrate this than to join fellow curl friends, developers and fans online on the exact birthday? At 17:00 UTC March 20, 2023. We run an Online birthday party open for everyone to join. Consider muting yourself when you join, but feel encouraged to leave the … Continue…
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
Philip K. Dick arrived in Canada on February 16th, 1972, as guest of honour for the 2nd Vancouver Science Fiction Convention ( VCON-2 ), an all-expenses-paid invitation, jointly sponsored by the science fiction societies of Simon Frazer University and the University of British Columbia. He was 43 years old, the author…
VT220 TrueType font
After viewing our CGA Redux livestream a friendly tinkerer named Arek contacted me if I was interested in a homebrew Hercules Graphics Card PCB that he designed. Naturally I said yes and assembled the card, playing beta tester for his design. It will probably be open sourced eventually, but is not yet available. So…
In a previous article, I revealed one of the secrets to MartyPC 's accuracy, hardware validation . To summarize, it is a method of using a m...
VisiCalc -- Links to the information from its creators, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, on this web site
A review of "Showstopper!" by G. Pascal Zachary and my own reflections
I've been on many projects that get canceled. We're building cool stuff. We're going above and beyond, and we're excited. But the project encounters reality, shifting priorities, or budgeting constraints, and the work never goes anywhere. It always feels tragic, but then I move on. But what if I didn't let a project…
"Just say whatever comes into your head each time..."
Whose Creators They Failed to Credit
Filipe Cruz (aka psenough) invited me to Inércia 2023, a local Demoscene event organized by the Associação Inércia that took place in the infamous Incrível Almadense. I’ve done my fair share of bouncing ball assembly demos in the 80s and others more recently, but I don’t qualify as a demoscener, not even by the lowest…
On the Herculaneum scroll and the underrated value of historical knowledge
David Patterson and team at UC Berkeley give RISC its name and make the first RISC microprocessor design.
The Greatest business film ever made... in Canada
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
I'm in the middle of turning two badly treated IBM ThinkPad 701CS machines (the ones with the lovely unfolding keyboard) into a single, wor...
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.
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?
Each computer on the Internet has its own public IPv4 address, similar to a phone number: for example, 131.193.178.181. The target of each packet of data is identified by a public IPv4 address.
This one time, at Intel, I wrote a compiler...
This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21, 1983.
