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Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Open Sourcing DOS 4
See the canonical version of this blog post at the Microsoft Open Source Blog! ...
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The Other Half
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
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How far back in time can you understand English?
An experiment in language change
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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there ...
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Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore
The top-secret story of why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox+Leaflet.
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Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
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The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996
It's time for a little dive into mid-1990s computer history!
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A subway-style diagram of the major Roman roads, based on the Empire ca. 125 AD
A map of the roads of ancient Rome, in the style of a transit diagram.
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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
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Only 90s Web Developers Remember This
Written pieces, talks, and other bits by Zach Holman.
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Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
In October 2019, my company SP Digital held an internal hackathon. My colleague Subhransu and I worked on a whacky idea of writing a brand-new Windows 3.1 app which was an OS released almost 30 years ago. The idea we chose was a Slack client. After all, Slack clients exist for most platforms but I’m certain one does…
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Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux
It’s an exciting time in the Lotus 1-2-3 enthusiast community – that was a joke, there is no enthusiast community, it’s just me! 😆
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It's time to make computing personal again
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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What Sun got wrong
We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies.
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
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“How America took out the Nord Stream pipeline”
The New York Times called it a “mystery,” but the United States executed a covert sea operation that was kept secret—until now
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What Happened to Yahoo
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
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I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
The systematic thinking errors that kill breakthrough technology and the decision framework that prevents these disasters
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IDEs we had 30 years ago
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
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A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
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Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
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The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)
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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3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous
the history of 3dfx Interactive
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Life before smartphones (2020)
An essay about life pre-iPhone addiction, why you're wrong about Salt Bae, an Indian butter chicken Instant Pot adventure, and a new Hell & Wellness pod discussing Marie Kondo.
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Television is 100 years old today
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