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Why we think giant pterosaurs could fly (2018)
Giant azhdarchid pterosaur in flight. Images like this virtually always trigger discussions about the validity of giant pterosaur flight h...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 178 posts.
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The Eternal Mainframe (2013)
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
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A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
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A computer built from NOR gates: inside the Apollo Guidance Computer
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 , the computer that provided guidance, navigation, and control onboard the Apollo flight...
126
Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
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NetBSD on the last G4 Mac mini and making the kernel power failure proof
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
128
Interface Builder's Alternative Lisp Timeline (2013)
Denison “Denny” Bollay is one of the guys at ExperTelligence that crafted the first Interface Builder (IB) and showed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jeff Wishnie introduced me (thanks dude) recently, and I’ve been talking to Denny as I have an agenda - Pseudo-declarative UIs - that is in complete opposition to my…
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Oldschool planar graphics and why they were a good idea
Oldschool planar graphics If you ever work with old hardware, like writing an NES emulator or reverse engineering an old Amiga game, you ...
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How to Join a Social Network in 1998
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
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Lego logic gates and mechanical computing
randomwraith.com - LEGO, Beer & pastimes
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The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting
Usenet—Netnews—was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it’s important to understand the technological constraints of the time.
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.
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The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587
At some point in 1589, a Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made up his mind: his self-portrait needed updating. Monte carefully ...
136
Atari Centipede’s Hidden Code Trap
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
137
Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
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Ilya Starinov – The godfather of modern insurgent IED warfare
I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post. Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in…
139
The Origin of Banking (2016)
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell my chickens…
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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
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Fukushima 8 years on – photo essay
Fukushima 8 years on
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The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
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IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
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Remembering Murray Gell-Mann
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
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Origin Sells Out
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
146
Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
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Put 1.7MB onto 1.44MB Floppies (1999)
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
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Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
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Pac-Man: How We Played the Game
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a “perfect game”. But until now, no one’s ever told you how people really played the…
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The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world