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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
I have a laptop. Sometimes I run VMs on it, and some of those VMs run DOS. When a DOS VM does not have any power management, the laptop quickly lets me know by kicking up the fan speed. It is Very Annoying . So annoying that I really want to avoid the situation.
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
Over 3,000 military maps, views and prints collected by King George III have been digitised and published online free to visit by the Royal Collection
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
Link to original post on rajuabju.com Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez ...
In case you have missed it, over the weekend, a new demo for IBM PC with CGA was released at Evoke, under the name Area 5150. It placed first in the competition, which should not surprise anyone: I…
Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) developed a method of computing determinants which has some practical advantages.
January 2024
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
There are rumors that the Obama campaign used an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, though further analysis seems to indicate that these images were fakes. It would be great if someone from the Obama…
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
UNIX is always litigious
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself. Recognizing a good…
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.
In 1998, I was a junior Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. My first project was shipping Internet Explorer 4 Plus, a CD-ROM with Internet Explorer 4.0 and a whole lot of tr…
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
