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What color was “Apple Beige”?
I went looking for a defining color of the personal computer era. I found it in an old jar of paint.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 263 posts.
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Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
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Reviving Old X Code
I've taken the week between Christmas and New Year's off this year. I didn't really have anything serious planned, just taking a break from the usual routine. As often happens, I got sucked into doing a project when I received this simple bug report Debian Bug #974011
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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.
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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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Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula . The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look.
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The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams
The man who invented the interactive fiction genre talks about its past and future.
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You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version. But there is a catch of course: theyre both very old and hard to run on a…
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A talk with Walter Bright about Empire
Our discussion on the creation of the great-granddaddy of all computer wargames
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PDP-11 Booting
Instructions for booting a PDP-11/34 with RT-11 from a RK05
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The Linux Distributions of 1992
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
73
A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
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Why V7 Unix matters so much
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)
In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.
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Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop
Tetris for the NES is one of my favourite versions of Tetris. My only complaint is that it lacks the ability to “hard drop” - instantly dropping the current piece and locking it into place.
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All Futurama Opening Quotes
All Futurama Opening Quotes in order, Futurama is the whipping boy of modern prime time cartoons, Made by the creators of Simpsons.
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
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1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive fiction.
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Black Hat Exploits of the Stupid-Easy 80s
I'm not saying there was no computer security in the 1980's but, wait... Yes. Yes I am.
84
The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
85
The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
86
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person…
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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Found a program I wrote in 1981 and decided to bring it back to life
When you find a weird program from four decades ago and realize that it's yours.
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Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)
Can history help us make sense of the term 'RESTful API'?