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Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change
Nikon losing the leadership position to Canon in the market for professional photography 30 year technology transition story.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 155 posts.
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Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…
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This Old Lisp
This is the keynote talk that I gave at the 2018 European Lisp Symposium in Marbella, Spain.
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Wing Commander II
If there was ever any doubt inside Origin Systems that Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander was destined to join Ultima as the company’s second great franchise, it was banished the moment the first game in the new series was released on September 26, 1990, and promptly sold by some accounts 100,000 copies in its first month…
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Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
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A study of musical scales (2017)
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
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The HP-35: Consumer Electronics, an Origin Story
Ault and Wiborg’s art nouveau poster ads.
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Memorandum on Microsoft’s strategy against Linux and Open Source software (1998)
In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…
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Soup – Alan Kay on Objects
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
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The Incredible Machine
As we saw in my previous article , Jeff Tunnell walked away from Dynamix’s experiments with “interactive movies” feeling rather disillusioned by the whole concept. How ironic, then, that in at least one sense comparisons with Hollywood continued to ring true even after he thought he’d consigned such things to his…
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A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64
Move over, Sennheiser. Make yourself scarce, Bose. Here comes the ultimate Hi-Fi solution for your living room: The Commodore 64! I s it sa...
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Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
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Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038
In a stuffed apartment filled with hydrofluoric acid, oscilloscopes and a transistor curve tracer, Jeri Ellsworth carefully places a hand-cut silicon wafer into a 1000 degree furnace. The ambient noise of police sirens can be heard in the background: "Ugh, the police are coming... So the instructions for the…
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Modern Linux in an ancient PC
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
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J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
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Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
Zet Casino 2026: tysiące gier, bonus powitalny, wpłaty BLIK i krypto, wypłaty w minutach oraz polskie wsparcie 24/7. Sprawdź naszą ofertę.
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Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
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Papers from the Lost Culture of Array Languages (2011)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Dark Side of the Mac: Appearance and Materials
One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before.
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Break down of a C64 demo effect
This generated a lot of lively discussion on twitter and /r/c64 . A bunch of people were curious as to how it works and I promised to explain it on my blog.
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Another World
The French creative aesthetic has always been a bit different from that of English-speaking nations. In their paintings, films, even furniture, the French often discard the stodgy literalism that is so characteristic of Anglo art in favor of something more attenuated, where impression becomes more important than…
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A History of the Sentence "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo." (1999-2015)
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
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How early 8-bit arcade machines differed in design from 8-bit home computers
TL;DR: what I learned about the Bomb Jack arcade machine while writingan emulator for it.
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