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The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars Is Dead
The Opportunity Rover , also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,3...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 178 posts.
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Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
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Soviet Arcade Games from the 70s and 80s
I was thinking recently that here in the West we take our video game history largely for granted. Look back at the Golden Age of video games, and it’s apparent that we had it pretty good R…
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Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…
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A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
A vision of an OS that recognizes that any user activity and most of the system activities are nothing but queries, which ought to be treated uniformly and implemented efficiently once and for all; database as a file system; A paper submitted to MacHack'95
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CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser
This marks the beginning of a week long adventure in Geneva Switzerland at CERN, to work on a hack project.
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Richard Feynman's Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
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Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...
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“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
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Quotes from 1992
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
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Instant stone (just add water) (2018)
If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!
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Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
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When Pepsi Had a Navy
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
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IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
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Thaddeus Kosciusko
So, we know all about the heroes of the American Revolution, right? George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere – OK, well, not him, he was a good silversmith, an average errand rider, and a godawfu…
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Buying an IBM Mainframe
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
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Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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Things to Know About GNU Readline
What is GNU Readline and where did it come from?
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80x25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
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What is ZIL anyway?
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
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Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
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