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Rebuilding memchess.com from its archive
Learn chess openings and variations online by repeating the most popular chess Master moves
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 304 posts.
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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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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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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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Revisiting the DOS Memory Models
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
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Refurb weekend: the Symbolics MacIvory Lisp machine I have hated
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago...
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Ultima (2012)
When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth , a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as…
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A History of C Compilers – Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
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Rabbit hole: stumbling across two Portuguese punched cards
Look, here's the thing, I don't like mysteries that involve technology. I think I hate them because I know that some other human created the...
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How Doom didn't kill the Amiga
A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.
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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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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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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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The Apple Jonathan: A 1980s concept computer that never shipped
In the middle of the 1980s, Apple found itself with several options regarding the future of its computing platforms. The Apple II was the company’s bread and butter. The Apple III was pitched as an evolution of that platform, but was clearly doomed due to hardware and software issues. The Lisa was expensive and not…
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The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Ko
You might think it’s unlikely for any interesting mathematics to arise from incense appreciation, but that’s only because you’re unfamiliar with the peculiar character of Muromachi (室町) era Japanese nobles. There has never been a group of people, in any time or place, who were so driven to display their sophistication…
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Of Psion and Symbian
Mobile before iOS and Android
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I Used Netscape Composer in 2024
The story of a geeky twist on "Party like it's 1999".
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The album art of Phil Hartmann (2022)
You might remember him from such roles as Troy McClure or Lionel Hutz, but in the years before legendary comic Phil Hartman shaved the second ‘n’ from his name, he was designing album art for some West Coast rock bands.
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The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
I praise his work as a composer—but also as plumber, taxi driver, steel mill worker, and in other trades
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Apple II graphics: More than you wanted to know
The Apple ][ is one of the most iconic vintage computers of all time. But since Wozniak’s monster lasted all the way until 1993 (1995 if you could the IIe ca...
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Tech has graduated from the Star Trek era to the Douglas Adams age
Posted on Wednesday 21 Feb 2024. 1,196 words, 13 links. By Matt Webb.
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Glucoboy
Emulating the unknown: Blood testing device for the GBA
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Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches (1994)
In addition to the basic materials, a number of safety-related items were needed to conduct this experiment. First, a suitable location for the experiment was required, it being expected that the kitchen was not the appropriate place for blow-torching SPTs. The author's driveway was chosen as a suitable site. Second…
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Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z
Launched in 1998, the 380Z was one very fine ThinkPad. It was the last ThinkPad to come in the classic bulky and rectangular form factor. It was also one of the first to feature a huge 13.3" TFT display, powerful 233MHz Pentium II, and whopping 160 megs of RAM.
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The Antikythera mechanism – 254:19 ratio
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
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On 17th century "cocaine"
A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca