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CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)
CIA & Army Counterintelligence involved in secret “processing” of U.S. POWs who confessed to using biological weapons against China, No…
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
62
Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org
tl;dr: Infinite Mac has a new home at infinitemac.org . Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4 . The project is also now accepting donations (via GitHub Sponsors or PayPal ).
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The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
Camel or rope? Examining the Greek word ‘kamilos’ and the origins of a persistent myth about the Bible.
65
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
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Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)
Many point to the fact that the Soviet Union collapse occurred as the Soviets were baited into trying to compete with the defense build-up ...
67
The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
68
The Joy of Computer History Books
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
69
How Equifax Was Breached in 2017
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…
70
"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
71
Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
72
This code smells of desperation
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
73
Windows XP Activation: Game Over
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
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Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
76
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...
77
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 ...
78
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…
79
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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The web’s most important decision
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
81
Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)
On Saturday, September 18 1993, Sierra's Macintosh games stopped working. Franchises froze as King's Quests, Space Quests, and even the Leisurely Suited Larries locked up. Practically every Mac SCI game had broken overnight. Sierra developed a patch within nine days, released it on their BBS, and announced it in their…
82
Why 56k is the fastest dial up modem speed
10stripe is a collection of computer and technology information, providing answers to common questions and concerns.
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Alan Kay on web browsers, document viewers, Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard (2021)
Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures…
84
Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236
How a series of errors on the ground and in the air caused a fully loaded passenger jet to run out of fuel in the mid-Atlantic.
85
Top suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison hack committed suicide in 2014
When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [ SPOILER ALERT! ]…
86
Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
87
The 90s Developer Starter Pack
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
88
When Google paid websites to promote Firefox
Having grown up in the 2000s, I love discovering that things I presumed were banal back then were, in fact, part of a bigger story.
89
Treasure trove of mechanical animations (2015)
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170
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The Piccadilly line’s new air conditioned trains
A railway running through the forests of west Germany is seeing a very unusual sight at the moment - as a Piccadilly line tube train is running through the area.