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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
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The day Return became Enter (2023)
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
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8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel
Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get
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Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
Visual Effects Supervisor - Scott Squires Visual Effects Director of Photography - Patrick Sweeney The effects for this movie were orig...
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The QNX Operating System
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
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The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
The rise and fall of yogh
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How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
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Brood War Korean Translations
As work slowed down during the last couple of weeks of 2024, I decided to redirect some of my energy to hobbies instead of work. One such hobby is StarCraft: Brood War (or BW for short), a classic, highly competitive RTS from '98 that still has an active community today.
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The decline of deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
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When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
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A History of Large Language Models
Large language models (LLMs) still feel a bit like magic to me. Of course, I understand the general machinery enough to know that they aren’t, but the gap between my outdated knowledge of the field and the state-of-the-art feels especially large right now. Things are moving fast. So six months ago, I decided to close…
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Why old games never die, but new ones do
It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers a…
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A file format uncracked for 20 years
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
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Railroad Tycoon II
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
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Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
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The biggest CRT ever made: Sony's PVM-4300
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
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EverQuest
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
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The PS2’s backwards compatibility from the engineer who built it (2020)
As the PS2 turns 20 in Japan, a look back on its PS1 backwards compatibility from the eyes of the former Sony engineer responsible for it.
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Infinite Mac OS X
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X , with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that…