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When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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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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Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Well, somebody had to find it.
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
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Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
Anyway, here's what happened: Not to say that big brother is everywhere, but short of having microsoft people monitoring our lists and newsgroups (with wouldn't overly surprise me, after all they also tried a PR compain with magazines, posing as simple users who liked microsoft products), the announcement was…
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Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
The full story of the 2021 ditching of a Boeing 737 cargo plane off Honolulu.
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Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports , I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
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Simulating History with ChatGPT
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
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The Backing Up of the Internet Archive Continues
A little over a month ago, I cooked up a grandiose plan with the Archive Team to back up the Internet Archive, and discussed what that might entail and how one might approach it. How’s that t…
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1584 LAN party photos from 1996 – 2010 from Australia's island state archived
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
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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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20 Years of YC / HN
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading…
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Counting the transistors in the 8086 processor: it's harder than you might think
How many transistors are in Intel's 8086 processor? This seems like a straightforward question, but it doesn't have a straightforward answ...
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The Grind a Day: thousands of Apple II floppy disks archived
4am doesn’t suffer fools, or repetition. Or mysteries. Focused out of nowhere on tinkering with an Apple II a number of years back, they re-learned the whole of how the unique floppy disk sys…
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Unladen Swallow Retrospective
I wrote this while I was at PyCon, but I kept revising it. Anyway, here goes. :) As is apparent by now, no one has really been doing any ...
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The Transistor, Part 1: Groping in the Dark
The road to a solid-state switch was a long and complex one. It began with the discovery that certain materials behaved oddly with respect to electricity – differently than any existing theor…
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
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The secret history of the about:jwz url
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
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The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)
The story of the infamous disappearance of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic, and the fundamentally human mistakes which led to the tragedy.
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Frank Lloyd Wright's mile high skyscraper proposal (2021)
Frank Lloyd Wright was an outspoken advocate for low-density cities without skyscrapers. With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the tower design pictured above came from Wright. It’s called The Illinois , and it was planned to be a mile (1,609 meters, or 5,280 feet) in height. That’s more than fou
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A small 2009 car demolishes a 1959 Chevy in a crash test [video]
In 2009, The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety conducted a crash test between a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 2009 Chevy Malibu. The video plainly shows how
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Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? (2013)
The Toolsmith Conference was held in Chapel Hill, NC, in October, 2001, to honor Fred Brooks. Dr. Brooks was a student of Howard Aiken at Harvard, joined IBM to work on the Stretch Project, and later served as chief architect of the IBM S/360. He founded the Computer Science Department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 1964 and…
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The innovations of Internet Explorer
The Official Web Site of Nicholas C. Zakas
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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
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Inside the Apollo “8-Ball” FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator)
During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight ...
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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.