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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
Using modern brute force approach to improve image quality on retro computers, by Arnaud Carré
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
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.
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…
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island . No puzzle spoilers, however…
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
Our discussion on the creation of the great-granddaddy of all computer wargames
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard insi…
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
subsea cables, internet infrastructure, telecom infrastructure, 2Africa, new subsea cable projects, layer 1 pricing on key international routes,
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
It all started with a project I was working on called “Fixing Gran Trak 10” about the first car racing arcade video game from 1974. I had completed the electrical repairs and was trying to intervie…
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and Information Security. (Okay…
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…
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! ]…
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
[Update: VileR’s writeup of the 1K colour mode is now up. His has fewer technical details but is much easier to understand than mine as it has pictures!]
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
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 ...
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.
