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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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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
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Weird architectures weren't supported to begin with
This post contains my own opinions, not the opinions of my employer or any open source groups I belong or contribute to.
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The Unix Philosophy
The ‘Unix philosophy’ originated with Ken Thompson's early meditations on how to design a small but capable operating system with a clean service interface. It grew as the Unix culture learned things about how to get maximum leverage out of Thompson's design. It absorbed lessons from many sources along the way.
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Retro-Tech Parenting
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
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The story of titanium
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
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A Relevant Tale: How Google Killed Inktomi
On March 20th, 2000 Inktomi had a market capitalization of 25 billion dollars. As a relatively early employee, I was a multimillionaire on paper. Life was good. In the next year and a half the stock went down by 99.9%. In the end, Inktomi was acquired by Yahoo for 250M. What happened? Among other things, Google. Grab…
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Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
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1931: Kurt Gödel shows limits of math, logic, computing, AI
His famous 1931 paper identified the fundamental limits of math, logics, theorem proving, computing, AI.
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Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
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When McDonalds Came to Denmark
Every few months, a prominent person or publication points out that McDonalds workers in Denmark receive $22 per hour, 6 weeks of vacation, and sick pay. This compensation comes on top of the general slate of social benefits in Denmark, which includes child allowances, health care, child care, paid leave, retirement…
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The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
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The day Return became Enter (2023)
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
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Rewriting Reddit (2005)
2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…
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8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
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Nintendo 3DS Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac
Home | Polski > Computer history > Advertisements > International > Apple Computer > Macintosh Newsweek advertisement Go back | Previous | Next Apple bought all of the advertising space in November/December special election issue of Newsweek in 1984, and devoted it all to Macintosh. Below you can see all 39 pages of…
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27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
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The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
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Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...