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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
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The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
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Every Graphics at Once: Nintendo's Popeye
I’ve made some modern games in retro style, and one thing people will always tell you is, make sure your pixels are the same size. When your base resolution ...
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History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today (2022)
History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today
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Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
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When did New York start building slowly?
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
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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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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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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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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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Cyberdecks (2013)
Article about the philosophy of custom made computers without displays, usually known as decks.
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Report on an Unidentified Space Station (1982)
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
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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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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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Remembering Doug Lenat and his quest to capture the world with logic
Stephen Wolfram shares memories of Doug Lenat, early AI pioneer and developer of the CYC system. Their discussions around AI & logic and the potential combined uses of their respective discoveries.
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What are the enduring innovations of Lisp? (2022)
Historically, Lisp was a behemoth in the world of language design innovation. The list of Lisp’s innovations is so long that I’d have to list most of the features associated with modern languages. (Do you like if statements? You can thank Lisp!)
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FPGAs and the renaissance of retro hardware
Almost every few weeks, a new and exciting retro hardware project is announced. These are truly …
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Reading Ancient Scrolls
This is an elaboration of my submission for the letter detection prize as part of the Vesuvius Challenge in June. It gets technical and esoteric but the first few paragraphs are of general interest…
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How to slow down scientific progress, according to Leo Szilard
“Science would become something like a parlor game. There would be fashions. Those who followed the fashion would get grants”
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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
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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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Simulating History with ChatGPT
The Case for LLMs as Hallucination Engines
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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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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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Hexadecimal clock counting down to 2038 problem
It is now ??????????.??? ( ????-??-??T??:??:??.???Z ) in Unix time , according to your local system clock.
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Going Rogue
When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it…
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64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!