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The Deep Insights of Alan Kay
If you haven’t heard of Alan Kay you’ll likley have heard one of his many famous quotes, the most popular, likely his 1971 gem: The best …
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
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Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
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Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released
The C64 conversion of Prince of Persia, based on the original Apple II code by Jordan Mechner has been released today. It requires a Commod...
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The Long Way Round (2014)
The morning of 6th January 1942 was a going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the controller manning LaGuardia’s airport’s tower, but it meant he’d have to remember to wrap up extra warm when he headed home.
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The Development of the C Language (2003)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
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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:
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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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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
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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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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
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The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
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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.
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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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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.
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Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons…
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STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…
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Geocities Cage at the Exodus Datacenter
This is what the inside of the cage looks like. Nearly all of the machines in the cage are Sun Ultra 2s. Attached to nearly all of these boxes are dual sets of MTI JBODs ("Just a Box Of Disks") (either 2500s or 8300s). The newer JBODs (the 8300) make up the majority of the storage arrays in the cage. Nearly all of the…
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This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
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TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
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A platform-jumping prince – History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports
Blog posts and articles by author and game developer Jordan Mechner
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My grandfather was almost shot down at the White House (2018)
When I owned Piper N47943, a four seat single engine airplane, I thought it prudent not to fly myself to assignments. I did not want the…
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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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Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
Zet Casino 2026: tysiące gier, bonus powitalny, wpłaty BLIK i krypto, wypłaty w minutach oraz polskie wsparcie 24/7. Sprawdź naszą ofertę.