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Why we need Lisp machines
A personal mind dump on operating systems
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 298 posts.
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Roman Egypt was a strange province
Welcome back! We are back from our November hiatus and thus back to regular weekly posts! This week we’re going to answer the runner-up question in the last ACOUP Senate poll (polls in which …
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Balloon framing is worse-is-better (2021)
Today in the US, most houses and apartments are built using light framed wood construction. This system consists of load bearing walls made from 2x4s or 2x6s, which support a wood-framed floor or roof - usually either trusses, joists, or engineered i-joists. This system is a variant of a framing style known as balloon…
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Robertson vs. Torx screw drives (2021)
I’m going to get straight to the point and say that it’s time for Robertson screws to be retired and supplanted by Torx. This posting is to explain why and is partly motivated by lots o…
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part III: On the Move
This is the third part of a three part (I, II, III) look at some of the practical concerns of managing pre-industrial logistics. In our last post, we outlined what ‘foraging’ actually e…
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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...
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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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Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor
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…
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The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
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The First Lisp Compiler
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…
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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
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…
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Random Ultima Online anecdote #2 – Horses inside players (2014)
I just stumbled across this old story I told somewhere, and thought I’d share more widely.
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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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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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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
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Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
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3Hz Computer, Hold the Transistors
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II , a mechanical digital 1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.
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The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)
Today's date is a good excuse to memorize a few more digits of 3.1415926 53589793 23846264 33832795....
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Retro Compaq LTE Laptop Powered by Raspberry Pi
A while ago a came across an old Compaq LTE 286 laptop. When they were first released around 1989, these PCs were somewhat groundbreaking because they were the first to be compact enough to resemble the “notebook” form factor that we take for granted today. Unfortunately this particular unit was pretty much beyond…
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Why was western printing superior to Asian printing?
Movable type was not invented by Gutenberg but in China and later advanced in Korea, so why didn't Asia have a printing revolution?
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My story on “worse is better” (2018)
“ The Rise of Worse is Better ” is a famous essay in the software industry. It says that lazily-looking code that does not provide a consistent interface is sometimes actually better than neatly layered, consistent one. I think I've experienced this paradoxical situation, so I'd like to share that story.
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
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APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)
APL tutorial explaining the meaning of life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}
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Lisp in Space
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
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I can no longer compile my first Flash game
A tale about game development and techonlogy obsolescence
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The story of the first “computer bug” is a pile of lies
A fun, endearing, delightful pile of lies.