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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 123 posts.
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Born for it – How the image of software developers came about
Where did the common image of the socially-awkward, white, male programmer come from?
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
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Pete Davies: The ‘Invadar’ Arcade Collection
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that…
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A Historical Tour of Silicon Valley
A tour of Silicon Valley
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 9: tracing a crash through software and hardware
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
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Making an MSX font
I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked...
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Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
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Mainframes as a lifestyle choice
I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…
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Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer…
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display
This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC ...
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In defense of Unix
While there may be some situations in which DOS has a better command, Unix works better overall.
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Browser History (2013)
Wow! This takes me back! Please check the date this post was authored, as it may no longer be relevant in a modern context.
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Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
Wherein the author discusses the Plan 9 operating system. First of several.
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Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
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The Birkana hexadecimal number symbols
AMONG number systems, the hexadecimal system of counting (or 'radix') has a special place in the hearts of programmers, being closely relate...
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One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz
an extremely simple processor design
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Somali Law
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
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The format of strings in early (pre-C) Unix
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Russian ship loitering near undersea cables
**Russian ship loitering near undersea cables** Updated: Original article 9th Oct. 2016. The Russian Navy’s Project 22010 mini-sub host ship Yantar is known for loitering near undersea internet cables (known as Submarine communications Cables - SCC). It may have other special missions also…. Read More >….
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The Secrets of Medieval Fonts
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering tha…
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The Computer Revolution Has yet to Happen
A combination of this “carry anywhere” device and a global information utility such as the ARPA network or two-way cable TV, will bring the…
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…