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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 244 posts.
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.
A blog about software craft and quality
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
A blog about software craft and quality
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
A blog about software craft and quality
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are flat “billboarded” stock images of food? This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has per...
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64 has reached 100% matching decompilation. A brief note on what that means, how we got here, and what comes next.
Notes on Chapter 1 of Principia Mathematica
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
The original Snowboard Kids has been fully decompiled in only 84 days! In this post I delve into what changed and what lessons might apply to future projects.
A 13-year-old on a walk in the Spandau district of Berlin discovered a rare ancient bronze coin from Troy . It dates to between 281 and 261 B.C. and was issued by the mint at Ilion (Classical and Hellenistic era Troy). Now on display at the PETRI Museum, it is the first Greek antiquity ever discovered inside the city…
