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It Is Done
When I can feel my face again, and after I finish cleaning up my untouched-for-a-week life up in New York, I will sit down and write a proper Post-mortem of everything, but here’s the high le…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Welcome (back) to Macintosh
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
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Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
Visual Effects Supervisor - Scott Squires Visual Effects Director of Photography - Patrick Sweeney The effects for this movie were orig...
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Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The Secret Life of Circuits
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
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I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
A story about data and a very foolish hobby
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Epistemic standards for “Why did it take so long to invent X?”
How to answer this question—and how not to
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.
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Ultima VIII – How to destroy a gaming franchise in one easy step
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
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Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
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The British Library puts 1M newspaper pages online for free
The British Library project to digitise copies of newspapers from its archive is to release one million pages as a free resource.
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I'm reading the FT and WSJ from 100 years ago each week leading to 1929
This week, the Dow languishes near multi-decade lows and blue-chip stocks trade below book value.
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ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit
ICQ is turning 20 (and that is no small potatoes). A whole generation has already grown up with the forerunner of all messengers. For this…
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“News is what somebody does not want you to print – all the rest is advertising”
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
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My dad built a cool thing but never boasted about it
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
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The QNX Operating System
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
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Bullfrog After Populous
I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture. And then there’s me. I had the…
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Found at Goodwill: WebPad 1001 Prototype
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
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Is your son a computer hacker? (2001)
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
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Fixing bugs like it's 1988
I grew up in the 80's, the decade home computers went from curiosity to mainstream. In primary school we had several Philips P2000T home com...
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Live coding a vi for CP/M from scratch
The other day, being unable to find a suitable open-source text editor for cpmish , I sat down and wrote a simple vi-like editor. It took nine hours. I have it all on video.