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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 71 posts.
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Blu-Ray Still Blows
Some time ago I wrote an entry that got some attention about the Blu-ray format and why I refuse to release anything on it. It’d be nice to release the text adventure documentary in what Blu-…
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In which I switch on a 30 year old computer and it just works
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of visiting my parents and getting out an old computer. One of the first computers I used a lot was the Shar...
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Jason Scott: "A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it."
A terrible thing happened recently. You might have missed it. AOL Hometown, which itself was actually a combination of a bunch of previously acquired websites, shut down. It shut down on October 31…
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How To build a radio in a POW camp -- the real life King Rat
QRP(Low Power Amateur Radio)
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Feynman, Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering
On January 28th, 1986, Space Shuttle Challenger was launched at 11:38am on the 6-day STS-51-L mission. During the first 3 seconds of liftoff the o-rings (o-shaped loops used to connect two cylinders
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A Life that Added Up to Something: Paul Erdos (1996)
WASHINGTON - One of the most extraordinary minds of our time has "left." "Left" is the word Paul Erdos, a prodigiously gifted and productive mathematician, used for "died." "Died" is the word he used to signify "stopped doing math." Erdos never died. He continued doing math, notoriously a young person's field, right…
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Development Journal for Price of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Nuclear Reactor Wall Charts
Super Phénix: Creys-Malville Nuclear Power Station, River Rhone (Sur le Rhone) Creys-Malville, Isere, France, Centrale Nucleaire Europeen...
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Mind Hacks: Breaking the news of Eliza's creator's death to her
Hello, I am Eliza. Hi Eliza. I’m Vaughan. Did you come to me because you are Vaughan? I did. I am sad because I just found out that your creator, the computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum, has…
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Survival tips if you find yourself in the Middle Ages?
I spend far too much of my life daydreaming about scenarios like this: I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random locat
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"Whatever happened to...?" The odd fates of 25 legendary tech products.
Old computer products, like old soldiers, never die. They stay on the market--even though they haven't been updated in eons. Or their names get slapped on new products--available only outside the U.S. Or obsessive fans refuse to accept that they're obsolete--long after the rest of the world has move
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Greybeard Stories: The Bouncing Torpedo
Sometimes the stories can't even be told. But some, after time, can. I'm starting to write them up, and this is one of them.
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The Making of Prince of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Keynes, Explained Briefly
If you read the economic textbooks, you’ll find that the job market is a market like any other. There’s supply (workers) and demand (employers). And the incredible power of market competition pushes the price (wages) to where those two meet. Thus massive unemployment is about as likely as huge unsold piles of wheat…
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Google Multivac
In 1958 Isaac Asimov wrote a short story titled "All the Troubles of the World" (included in the collection "Nine Tomorrows" ). It described a world transformed by Multivac, a giant all-knowing computer. Asimov died in 1992, a mere four years before Larry and Sergey started their project "to organize the world's…
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A 3700-year-old proof that the diagonal of a unit square has length √2
Clicking on an image will bring up the same image at higher resolution (a download of about about 100 KB). Clicking on that in turn will download an image of about 300 KB.
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The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…
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