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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 304 posts.
The summer of 2007 was an eventful one if you were into cell phones. It all started on June 29 when Apple announced the release of the iPhone. If you have never taken the time to watch the full keynote, I highly recommend it.
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could…
Welcome to the latest edition of my on-going series in Cray-related computational necromancy. This was another just-for-fun project. Over the many years Andras and I have been working on our Cray revival efforts, there has always been a big lag between our available software (and Andras’ amazing simulator ) and my…
The recent announcement of the discovery of three new Aztec codices is covered here for the English-speaking public.
It’s no secret that the Allies won World War II on the back of the U.S.’s enormous industrial output.
or How a Rebellious Youth Briefly Conquered the World
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.
The man who gave us the solution to the Entscheidungsproblem
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
A story about data and a very foolish hobby
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
Awhile back, I had the chance to dump a game for MAME. I told myself that if the chance ever came up again, I’d contribute again. Luckily, it turns...
October 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of MQTT, a crucial protocol for connecting devices in diverse environments. With origins in lightweight networks, MQTT has flourished, empowering countless a…
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
