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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 139 posts.
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Ultima VI
After Richard Garriott and his colleagues at Origin Systems finished each Ultima game — after the manic final crunch of polishing and testing, after the release party, after the triumphant show appearances and interviews in full Lord British regalia — there must always arise the daunting question of what to do next…
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
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The Craft of Text Editing (1999)
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
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The beginning of the end for copper wire
The FCC voted last Thursday to relax the rules for retiring copper wiring. This change was specifically aimed at Verizon and AT&T and is going to make it a lot easier for them to tear down old …
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Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg
It all started with a project I was working on called “Fixing Gran Trak 10” about the first car racing arcade video game from 1974. I had completed the electrical repairs and was trying to intervie…
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Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars
When some search for the roots of the First World War, there is a tendency to look towards the Balkans. After all, it was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian E…
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Apple Power Macintosh G5: Flame On
Let's have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5 , a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks. So weighty that it crea...
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When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?
It’d be difficult to argue against the fact that The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was. Even just a quick glance at the IMDb ratings is enough to see that the show is routinely not hitting the highs it did so regularly in the earlier seasons. I’d suggest...
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The Etiquette of the Victorian Ballroom: Twenty Tips for Single Gentlemen
Twenty tips addressing the basics of ballroom etiquette for single Victorian gentlemen.
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History of AOL Warez
Link to original post on rajuabju.com Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez ...
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Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
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Memories of Kurt Gödel
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
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Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
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Photos from Inside North Korea (2014)
I visited North Korea for 16 days in 2014. Here are 100 photos I took inside all corners of this secretive socialist nation.
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The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
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The origins of XXX as FIXME
In which I go digging into source archives from 40-50 years ago, to figure out why we use XXX to mark dodgy code.
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The Wonderful WiFi232: BBSing Has Never Been Easier
Over the past year or so, I’ve been loading up SyncTerm and logging in to various telnet-accessible BBSs here and there — nothing too consistent. But, thanks to a piece of kit released by Paul Rickards, over the past month … Continue reading →
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The evolution of Unix architecture in two diagrams
Today I put online two diagrams depicting the architecture of the Unix operating system , one for the 1972 First Research Edition and one for FreeBSD, one of its direct descendants. Here are the details on how I created these diagrams.
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The Long Way Round (2014)
The morning of 6th January 1942 was a going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the controller manning LaGuardia’s airport’s tower, but it meant he’d have to remember to wrap up extra warm when he headed home.
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Steve Jobs and the Missing “Intel Inside” Sticker
I’d be quite content if I never again heard the Intel “bong” at the end of every PC ad.