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South Kensington station's escalator replacement project
Deep underneath South Kensington tube station, a huge project is underway to replace all five of the station's escalators, and all of them at the same time.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
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The BYTE magazine covers by Robert Tinney
During the 1970s and 1980s, Robert Tinney illustrated some of the most amazing computer artwork for BYTE magazine.
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The Secret Button
There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.
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CERN day 1: rebuilding the first web browser
This marks the beginning of a week long adventure in Geneva Switzerland at CERN, to work on a hack project.
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Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
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A treasury of Zork maps
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
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The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
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Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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The Early Days of Valve from a Woman Inside
The Untold Story Behind a Meteoric Rise
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Email could have been X.400 times better
X.400 promised recallable, scheduled, self-destructing email. Why simple SMTP won instead, and what we lost and gained when it did.
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The TRON Project: How Japan almost ruled IT (2022)
Stockpicking of unloved and undervalued Japanese companies using the Graham and Dodd framwork of value investing.
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Nikon versus Canon: A Story of Technology Change
Nikon losing the leadership position to Canon in the market for professional photography 30 year technology transition story.
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Picking up glowing hot space shuttle tiles with bare hands (2011) [video]
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
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Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
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Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…
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Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.
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This Old Lisp
This is the keynote talk that I gave at the 2018 European Lisp Symposium in Marbella, Spain.
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My Mega65 has arrived
This week I returned from a business trip overseas for the past few weeks. This is why I haven't been able to blog this month until now. But...
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The Geocities Torrent (~1TB of awesomeness)
Well, here we are on October 26th, 2010. Can it really be a year ago that Archive Team had dozens of people assaulting Yahoo’s servers desperately trying to save disappearing history? Well, l…
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The Olivetti Company
Beautiful machines from a beautiful country
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Preserving Fisher-Price Pixter
Dmitry.GR: Fisher-Price Pixter: From unknown and obscure to fully documented, emulated, and preserved
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Write up of my homebrew CPU build
The blog of an engineer from Canada
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Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any …