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No One Ever Saw the Snow Cruiser Again (2019)
"REAL stories. REAL history."
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 263 posts.
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Steven Weinberg has died
I heard this morning the news that Steven Weinberg passed away yesterday at the age of 88. He was arguably the dominant figure in theoretical particle physics during its period of great success fr…
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The Tamagotchi Cemetery
In 1996, Japanese toy designers Aki Maita and Yokoi Akihiro debuted the first ever Tamagotchi.
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Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
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Google could have killed Facebook with the flick of a switch
As we near the end of this decade, and more importantly the end of the hell that was 2020, I realised two things. First, I survived catching Covid-19, and secondly that I had a good story about the…
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Loom EGA/VGA Comparison
The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari . The character art was done by Gary Winnick and Steve Purcell . Gary Winnick designed the sprites and did most of the sprite animation, while Steve Purcell did the larger character portraits and some additional animation. Ken Macklin did the effects…
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1982: The Hobbit
Veronika Megler just wanted a part-time job while she finished her college degree. She didn't realize it would end with her writing one of the first computer game blockbusters.
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Satoshi leaked his Los Angeles IP address (2016)
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
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Interpreting 9/11 commemorative Afghan carpets (2011)
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
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Julia and the Reincarnation of Lisp (2020)
Background
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System Shock
We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…
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The Most-Used Mathematical Algorithm Idea in History (2016)
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
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Narco Submarine Found in Spain
**Disguised Narco Submarine Found In Europe** Police in Malaga, Spain have reported that they have discovered a narco-submarine aboard a ship. It is the fourth so-called narco submarine found in Europe in the last 15 years…Read More >….
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Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
And other misadventures
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Universal Paperclips
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Well, somebody had to find it.
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Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part IVa: Dyed in the Wool
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This is the first half of the fourth part of our four part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at the production …
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Freespin: C64 demo running on 1541 floppy drive
Freespin is a Commodore 1541 demo, released in 2021. It runs on the Commodore floppy drive. It is is the first demo on this device.
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Spartan School (2019)
This is Part I of a seven part series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, Gloss., Retrospective) comparing the popular legacy of Sparta (embodied in films like 300) with the historical ancient state. Toda…
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The end of TenFourFox and what I've learned from it
Now that I have your attention. I've been mulling TenFourFox's future for awhile now in light of certain feature needs that are far bigger ...
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NeXTSpirit: high-res NeXTSTEP Icons for macOS
I’ve always liked icons, make some occasionally for my personal use. I like especially old systems ones, from Mac OS Classic of course, but others too, Like BeOS, NeXTSTEP. Always found NeXTSTEP to have the most elegant interface of all, with that very sober windows and buttons style, yet beautifully detailed icons…
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Two perspectives on a designer who Steve Jobs could not hire
Richard Sapper may not be a household name, but he's on the same level of greats like Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive.
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PalmOS on Raspberry Pi
My PalmOS port is making progress on a desktop computer, with keyboard, mouse and a 1920×1080 monitor for display. While that was interesting, I wanted to try a different form factor, one tha…
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The Secret Life of Machines
SERIES 1 The Vacuum Cleaner The Washing Machine The Sewing Machine The Refrigerator The Central Heating System The Television
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Analogue Pocket Hate Story
Back in late 2019, the FPGA -based hardware emulation company Analogue , known for their near-flawless clones of various retro video game consoles announced an exciting new product. This time around, instead of plugging into your TV and playing the games of one system (per device), the product called the Analogue…