Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
As the course progressed, I discovered that some of this stuff was actually logical, and also kind of fun. I found myself using the piano room just to play around. I never cared much for attempting to play sheet music, but the idea of hitting keys and getting a sound that was sometimes harmonious was strangely…
I want to wish everyone happy Yule festivities! Midwinter in the northern hemisphere has passed, the days are now slowly becoming longer.
Discover the wild world of Ghanaian and Nigerian hand-painted movie posters. Created by local artists in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold, surreal artworks turned Hollywood films into folk art masterpieces that are so bad they’re brilliant.
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more
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
Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.
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.
... 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
Nine is a small, seemingly impossible C64 demo that I released at Fjälldata 2025.
The GPS pioneer took direct hits from Apple (iPhone, Watch) and Google (Maps). But huge R&D investment helped turn the company from an automotive GPS firm to a leader in fitness watches and trackers.
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
Introduction During the late 1980s, Namco set out to create the world’s largest arcade game. The result was Galaxian3: Project Dragoon; a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the …
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
The other enterprise Linux company
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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.
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
