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CGA in 1024 Colors – A New Mode: The Illustrated Guide (2015)
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
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Early Computer Art in the 50s and 60s
A deep dive on the early days of creative computing coming to life. Punch cards, plotters, light pens and lots more.
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Addendum: Crucible Steel and Cast Iron
This week, as an addendum to our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, we’re going to look at two alternative regional processes, where th…
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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
A former coworker pointed me to the news today that freshmeat has suddenly ceased operations. I spent the rest of the day flooded with memories and the urge to jot a few of them down before they’re…
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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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Wii U Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
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1977: Zork
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years later.
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Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for m...
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The lost Van Jacobson paper that could save the Internet
One of my heroes has always been Van Jacobson. His 1988 paper on solving TCP congestion is an enjoyable read, with cross-discipline appeal. The history of all this is fascinating, such as congestio…
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The vi family
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
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Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)
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1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play
A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.
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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…
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80386 microcode disassembled
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)…
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Remember when people tracked bugs?
I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…
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FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.
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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
Oldest registered domain names in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains
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Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
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…
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
Writing and photos by Brennan Moore
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A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll
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