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Why Are There So Many 17th Century Paintings of Monkeys Getting Drunk?
One cold Friday in 1660, Samuel Pepys encountered two unpleasant surprises. "At home found all well," he wrote in his diary, "but the m...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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First TV Image of Mars: Interplanetary color by numbers (2016)
For the longest time I had seen this framed image entitled “The First TV Image of Mars” in an out of the way place at JPL. I loved taking people there showing them this low res image and how it had been made by coloring numbers that were stapled to a wall. When I got to curate an exhibition about data and art, I had…
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As much as you ever wanted to know about 155M artillery shell production
America: The Ultimate Crammer
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Wirecard – The “German Enron”, and a personal history
For those who just came back from a 15 year space mission: Wirecard is a German company that according to its website is ” one of the world’s fastest-growing digital platforms for fina…
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They knew it was round, damn it
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
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Crazy Eddie Fraud
The Crazy Eddie fraud may appear smaller and gentler than the massive billion-dollar frauds exposed in recent times
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Lost Generation: The Relay Computers
Our previous installment described the rise of automatic telephone switches, and of the complex relay circuits to control them. Now we shall see how scientists and engineers developed such relay c…
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Reflecting on the Soul of a New Machine
Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine . Taking it off…
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DAK and the Golden Age of Gadget Catalogs
Hi. My name is Cabel. And I’ve probably got the neatest job in the whole world. I wear many hats. But here on my personal blog, I get to write about the things I really care about, just for y…
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The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…
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The soul of a new computer company
Over the summer, I described preparing for my next expedition. I’m thrilled to announce that the expedition is now plotted, the funds are raised, and the bags are packed: together with Steve Tuck and Jess Frazelle , we have started Oxide Computer Company .
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Without Flash the current web tech stack might look different
Google trends, Apple, Google Chrome and plenty of developers put a cross on Flash. In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different. Credentials I wrote my first line of code in ActionScript 2.0 it was 13 years ago and it was streamlined with the style of web. Big boom of
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Inverted computer culture: A thought experiment
Imagine a world where computers are inherently old. Whatever you do with them is automatically seen as practice of an ancient and unchanging tradition. Even though new discoveries do happen, they cannot dispel the aura of oldness.
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The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago
The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
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How Copyover MUD Servers Worked
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…
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Memories of .us
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
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How Unix erases things when you type a backspace while entering text
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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Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it…
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
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Yesterday's Pixels, Today
In August I finished work on a game called Restricted Airspace for the Wonderbundle, a bundle of new games by NYC game designers available as a reward to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter . It is a 3rd person aerial shooter in the style of the original Star Fox set in a city modeled on Beirut in the 1890s. It was…
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Reverse Engineering Wipeout
In 1995 one of my all time favorite video games was released: the original WipEout for PlayStation. The brand new PlayStation produced 3D graphics previously unseen on living room TVs and WipEout exploited its capabilities like no other game at the time. It was one of the pioneering titles of the fifth generation…
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Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.
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What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
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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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How the Great Pyramid at Giza Looked in 2560 BCE
The current outer surface of the Great Pyramid at Giza is made of rough limestone blocks, colored a dark sandy brown from hundreds of years of pollution and wea