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MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Celebrating the first NES Tetris game crash
Blue Scuti made history, breaking NES Tetris in a way that was previously only theoretical. Here is a glimpse into the what, who, and how.
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A vector graphics workstation from the 70s
A bit of history and a repair of a Tektronix 4051 graphical computer from 1975. What was this computer's place in history, what was it used for and what parts exploded when turning it on.
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The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
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Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
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The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
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Why Don’t We Use Chemical Weapons Anymore?
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
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I collect and read old computer manuals
It’s my ritual: every time I enter a secondhand bookshop, I go straight to the Sciences section and search for old computer …
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A 48Khz digital music player for the Commodore 64
Move over, Sennheiser. Make yourself scarce, Bose. Here comes the ultimate Hi-Fi solution for your living room: The Commodore 64! I s it sa...
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How Slide Rules Work
The survival of our species owes much to our brain, specifically, its ability to observe, analyse, and plan. Planting crops and storing grains for the winter were some of the earliest uses of these abilities. Measuring and calculating are foundational elements of observation, analysis, and planning. Computation, upon…
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On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
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Win16 Retro Development
Several months ago I had a go at producing a high resolution 256-color driver for Windows 3.1. The effort was successful but is not yet complete. Along the way I re-learned many things I had forgotten, and learned several new ones. This blog entry is based on notes I made during development.
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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person…
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John Carmack's First Game
A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.
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The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: ...today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over d
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Bare Metal (The Emacs Essay)
The following submission to Jeremy Friesen’s ‘elevator pitch’-themed Emacs blog carnival is taken from my rather long manuscript in progress (‘the present work’), tent…
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Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
1102
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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The Irish Logarithm
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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Cash Cows
He was born, farmed, and died at Dishley, much like his father before him. But Robert Bakewell, unlike most people, caught the improving mentality, or attitude — the one thing all inventors, both then and now, have in common — which had him viewing everything around him in terms of its capacity for betterment. The…
1108
Midcentury North American Restaurant Placemats
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of…
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Omnimax
In a previous life, I worked for a location-based entertainment company, part of a huge team of people developing a location for Las Vegas, Nevada. It was COVID, a rough time for location-based anything, and things were delayed more than usual. Coworkers paid a lot of attention to another upcoming Las Vegas…
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The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
Winner, 2020 Best Information Science Book Award Winner, 2020 Sally Hacker Prize Winner, 2021 Computer History Museum Prize