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Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
Explained by a former Sony engineer
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 244 posts.
92
Don't you mean extinct?
In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films [1] . To the public the experience was magic. But for some of the people in the movie industry, it was a rude awakening.
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F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
From Pascal and ex tapes to a VAX system: Bill Joy handles BSD distribution and debugging, then joins Ozalp Babaoglu to bring virtual memory to Unix.
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My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
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Alternate clock designs and time systems
A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.
96
Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
97
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.
98
The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
99
Japanese symbols that speak without words
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
100
Infinite Mac: BeOS
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
101
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
102
Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
103
Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Graphics for Professionals
104
Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.
105
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
106
Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way
This isn't quite right , but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check:
107
Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.
108
How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
When Japan broke up its national railway in 1987, the new companies agreed on one thing to keep the same.
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Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)
It has been two decades since the video game Max Payne was release on July 23, 2001. The game itself was some incredible homage to The Ma...
111
Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems te…
112
The End of an Athlon
When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most.
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Amiga 1000: Ten years ahead of its time
This computer was so good and so far out there, we didn't know what we had.
115
Using LLMs to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
Using GPT-6 and Opus 5.5 to trace alchemical knowledge and decode 17th century letters
116
WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
117
LotusNotes
I tend to focus on the origin of the computer within the military. Particularly in the early days of digital computing, the military was a key customer, and fundamental concepts of modern computing arose in universities and laboratories serving military contracts. Of course, the war would not last forever, and…
118
How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
A Newspaper Classifieds Story
119
The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
120
11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
A unique statue depicting a human sitting on the back of a leopard has been unearthed from the Neolithic site of Karahan Tepe near Şanlıurfa, southern Turkey. The figure is 70 cm (27.6 inches) high and was discovered in what archaeologists believe was its original location: on a stone platform along the wall of a…