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Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
Gnutella Explanation
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 244 posts.
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A retrospective of my time on the internet
A thorough retrospective of my time on the internet.
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Tony Hoare has died
Limousin, Saint-Yrieix-la-perche, Périgord, Université, société, Livres, citations, Nantes, Jumilhac
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The tech of 'Terminator 2' – an oral history (2017)
Ever since James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I’ve been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had to basically invent new way…
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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
One keyboard bug three decades in the making
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Reverse Engineering SimTower
Creating a perfect clone of SimTower in the browser
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Childhood Computing
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
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The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule ov…
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How machines learned precision
How do you make an accurate machine without one to copy? Explore flat surfaces, screw-cutting lathes, and millionth-of-an-inch measurements through interactive 3D figures.
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Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server
After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo . About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary.
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Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
A papyrus fragment of Homer’s epic The Iliad has been discovered inside the wrappings of Roman-era mummy . The mummy was found in a necropolis the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa) in Egypt’s Minya Governorate. Archaeologists were able to remove the papyrus and identify the text as the “Index of…
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Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
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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 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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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
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A Brief History of Fish Sauce
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
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The tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view
The enormous faux shopping bag that served as an advertisement for Macy’s is mostly gone, save for a patch of red facing Sixth Avenue. Scaffolding covers the ground floor retail space, and da…
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VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
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It's a shame what's happened to radio
Why I wouldn't enjoy returning to radio as a disk jockey.
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Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
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Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
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They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
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Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age
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Knuth reward check
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.