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When Apple Built a Mac OS Running on Top of Solaris and HP-UX
Macintosh Application Environment for Unix -- from back in 1994.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 298 posts.
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New technical analysis confirms the evidence against Billy Mitchell
Hot off the heels of the new Billy Mitchell testimony published on Friday, perfectpacman.com is proud to publish a new 48-page technical analysis by hardware engineer and Donkey Kong expert Tanner Fokkens. Fokkens is a moderator and longtime member of Donkey Kong Forum, and co-founder of Snektronix Incorporated…
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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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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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SQLite Doesn't Use Git
Instead, it uses Fossil as a version control system. Some thoughts.
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DOS on Dope (2010)
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
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Using an Amiga in 2021: Making an intro
Every once in a while, someone asks about my interests. I usually just say I'm into home computers from the 1980s and, since most people are very nice and polite, they then ask what I do with them. I usually say something about competing in computer graphics at "digital art festivals," because explaining what the…
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Lua, a Misunderstood Language (2021)
AndreGarzia.com website
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Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)
How Classicists tricked themselves into not learning Latin well.
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On the Origin of the iPhone
As a product, the original iPhone exemplified Apple’s holistic approach to hardware and software that are designed for each other, yet, at the engineering level, the iPhone hardware and software teams were almost completely siloed, with only Jobs and a mere handful of his most trusted (and talented) senior executives…
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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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Bell Labs Org Chart (1980)
I've always been curious about the story of Bell Labs – how it was formed, why it was successful, its challenges and struggles, innovation engine, people, its organizational structure, operations, and its legacy. The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner is an excellent albeit slightly inaccurate summary of what, how, and
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An Apple II Tale
I’ve been an active IRC users for nearly 25 years now, and for many of those years I was a denizen of the #a2c.chat channel on the irc.a2central.com IRC server. (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a channel-based internet text … Continue reading →
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The Home Computer Generation
A seemingly frightening realization regularly dawns on various pundits these days: Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. Due to a gradual transformation from general purpose tools to digital appliances, computers are now more than ever perceived as magical boxes by their users. Many…
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Why “process substitution” is a late feature in Unix shells
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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Bizarre Talmudic Scenarios
On this page of Talmud we read of a very bizarre case: יבמות נד, א אָמַר רַבָּה: נָפַל מִן הַגָּג וְנִתְקַע — חַיָּיב בְּאַרְבָּעָה דְּבָרִים, וּבִיבִמְתּוֹ לֹא קָנָה. בְּנֵזֶק, בְּצַעַר, בְּשֶׁבֶת, בְּרִפּוּי. אֲבָל בּוֹשֶׁת לָא מִיחַיַּיב, דְּאָמַר מָר: אֵין חַיָּיב עַל הַבּוֹשֶׁת עַד
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The MIPS ThinkPad, Kind Of
Pop quiz: what classic brand of laptop is this? I'll give you another hint. Bright-red TrackPoint and mouse button trim, classic keybo...
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Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years
Are you tired of heavy web pages, browser pop-ups, flashing banners, N-factor authentication, user tracking and analytics? Well, there are…
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LeCun's 2022 paper on autonomous machine intelligence does not cite prior work
1990: gradient descent learns subgoals. 1991: multiple time scales and levels of abstraction. 1997: world models learn predictable abstract representations...
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The best and worst of 1994 and predictions for '95
Disaster Relief. We saw the best of Internet users when they pulled together to help each other through several natural disasters in 1994. The year brought floods, earthquakes, and other major tragedies. Almost immediately following each of these events, Net users gathered around their terminals and formed newsgroups…
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How many computers are in your computer? (2021)
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
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IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
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Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages
This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
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Windows 9x Video Minidriver HD+
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox . The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern…
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TI-83 Plus One More
Repair of a TI-83 Plus calculator with a non-working screen