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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
Seriously. Someone did this. Because... why not?
I knew that data tables had been around a long time, but I didn't appreciate how long until I read recently about account-keeping in ancient Mesopotamia.
An Intel 8080 processor emulator written in less than 4K of C language and able to run CP/M. It won the Best of Show category (first place) of the 19th IOCCC. The 8080 originated the Zilog Z80 and started the personal computer's revolution.
Intel's groundbreaking 8008 microprocessor was first produced 45 years ago. 1 This chip, Intel's first 8-bit microprocessor, is the ancesto...
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…
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
On the Origin of Emacs in 1976 (Emacs blog articles)
Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.
I went looking for a defining color of the personal computer era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
Symbolic of the transfer of power from IBM to Microsoft?
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
This is my story as a game developer. It is also a story of how the Finnish game industry came to be.
Experienced professional software engineer based in York, UK
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
An unabridged history of RSS' triumphs and failures.
I loved my Nokia 5110 and I wonder if it was possible to breathe new life into this long-shelved and still-memed mobile phone. As it turns out, not only is it possible, but it's going to be a lot easier than I anticipated.
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…
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
... in specific domains. Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean
The art of the ancient mirror
