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F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
From Pascal and ex tapes to a VAX system: Bill Joy handles BSD distribution and debugging, then joins Ozalp Babaoglu to bring virtual memory to Unix.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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The Etiquette of the Victorian Ballroom: Twenty Tips for Single Gentlemen
Twenty tips addressing the basics of ballroom etiquette for single Victorian gentlemen.
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A Simple Request: VLC.js
Almost five years ago to today, I made a simple proposal to the world: Port MAME/MESS to Javascript. That happened. I mean, it cost a dozen people hundreds of hours of their lives…. and there…
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Life, Work, Death and the Peasant: Family Formation
This is the first part of the third part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) discussing the patterns of life of the pre-modern peasants who made up the great majority of al…
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The only flag of the world that is shredded by design
If you have played Kobadoo Flags you might have seen some extravagant flags with colourful designs, but you might not have seen before a fl...
998
Happy 20th Birthday, Quake
Twenty years. Wow. Where has all the time gone? We've all had many adventures during those years and Quake spawned many a game franchise and/or game company whether directly or through its influence. For this 20th I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur called QUAKETALK 95. This Quak
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Thaddeus Kosciusko
So, we know all about the heroes of the American Revolution, right? George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere – OK, well, not him, he was a good silversmith, an average errand rider, and a godawfu…
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Getting back into C programming for CP/M
This article is about how programming for CP/M, usng a 40-year-old C compiler, differs from modern C development, even for console applications.
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Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop
Tetris for the NES is one of my favourite versions of Tetris. My only complaint is that it lacks the ability to “hard drop” - instantly dropping the current piece and locking it into place.
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The Making of Warcraft, Part 2
Warcraft almost didn't become Warcraft. Part 2 gets into the hard calls, surprises, and turning points that shaped the hit.
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Stopping All Stations – The Pyongyang Metro
I was part of the first ever group of foreigners given access to all stations across both lines of the Pyongyang Metro. Here's my experience!
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Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
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Buying an IBM Mainframe
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
1007
All Futurama Opening Quotes
All Futurama Opening Quotes in order, Futurama is the whipping boy of modern prime time cartoons, Made by the creators of Simpsons.
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Soup – Alan Kay on Objects
As I listen to “Soup” by Can I’m reminded of the time when Alan Kay took some time to post on Hacker News addressing his thoughts and ideas about object-oriented programming. For raw context read the original thread, but in this post I’ll attempt to annotate some of what was posted. For the purpose of this post…
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20 Years of Vim
The hard work from maintainers turned Vim into a completely new editor, while still maintaining its spirit.
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RIPE meetings: IP addresses as spoils of war
Zobacz listę najlepszych kasyn online w Polsce na 2026 rok. Porównaj bonusy, gry live i metody płatności dla polskich graczy 🎰⚡
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Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane
We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orienta...
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
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Everything I know about floppy disks
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic "floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far.
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Alpha Centauri
In the spring of 1996, Brian Reynolds and Jeff Briggs took a long, hard look around them and decided that they’d rather be somewhere else.
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Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...