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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 298 posts.
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A secret Apple Silicon extension to accommodate an Intel 8080 artifact
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
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The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingl…
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Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
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Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)
I was just alerted to this story by one of the followers of this blog… Last month Voyager 2 began returning some unusual signals. This story is being reported by alternate news outlets as s…
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SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started
I fell down the rabbit hole making a homebrew SNES game a few days ago, and since I couldn't find many good resources, I figured I'd write something of a tutorial.
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An elegy for GNU and RMS
Assorted thoughts about rms, the GNU project, the FSF, and the future.
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A little story about the `yes` Unix command
What’s the simplest Unix command you know?<br /…
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Using grape harvest dates to estimate summer temperature over 650 years
It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even …
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Linux Kernel Module written in Scratch (a visual programming language for kids)
Seriously. Someone did this. Because... why not?
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P. J. O'Rourke, 1947-2022
Brilliant writer, beautiful soul
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How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford
The Real Story
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Secret Military Telephone Buttons
It's the first of the new year, which means we ought to do something momentous to mark the occasion, like a short piece about telephones. Why so much on telephones lately? I think I'm just a little burned out on software at the moment and I need a vacation before I'm excited to write about failed Microsoft ventures…
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I miss the programmable web (2021)
In some ways, we've taken a few steps back from a programmable web—two things I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts. Imagine having a bookmarked shortcut to do complex things like taking screenshots or saving a PDF. O...
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How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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Amazon’s distributed computing manifesto (1998)
Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon's ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.
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WordPerfect for UNIX (1992)
I found this interesting print-ad for WordPerfect for UNIX, apparently the best UNIX product of 1992! (Very) Belated congratulations Corel!
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The tyranny of the wagon equation
A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
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The lost ways of programming: Commodore 64 BASIC (2020)
How we interact with programming environment matters more than the language, but such interaction has never been widely studied. Inspired by the idea of 'complementary science', this essay recovers interesting ideas from how programming used to be done using Commodore 64 BASIC. Reading about interactions is not enough…
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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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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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Brute Force Colors
Using modern brute force approach to improve image quality on retro computers, by Arnaud Carré
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The integrated timetable of Switzerland
When people talk about great nation-wide public transit systems, names such as Japan or Switzerland are often mentioned. In this article I will show what makes Switzerland’s network so unique and why it is has become so popular.
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Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…