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Revisiting Knuth's “Premature Optimization” Paper
The most famous quote from Knuth’s paper “Structured Programming with go to Statements” is this: There is no doubt that the grail of efficiency leads to abuse. Programmers waste e…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
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Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980)
LISP-NOTES ON ITS PAST AND FUTURE-1980
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The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
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The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
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Kerosene did not save the sperm whale (2024)
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
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Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986)
=== This is a free online edition of Bruce Sterling's anthology Mirrorshades. === Coverted to webpage by Rudy Rucker, posted September 2022, and updated November 2023. === Each story is Copyright (C) 2022 to its original authors, and all rights are reserved. The book is not public domain, nor is it Creative Commons…
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A platform-jumping prince – History of Prince of Persia's 1990s Ports
Blog posts and articles by author and game developer Jordan Mechner
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The Hobby Computer Culture
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of …
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Woz: 'I Am the Happiest Person'
Link to: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466
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The raccoons who made computer magazine ads great
When I got my first job in technology journalism, my grandmother used to call the magazine where I worked “your catalog.” I winced. But in retrospect, she wasn’t that far off. Back then, if you wanted to buy a computer product—this was the early 1990s, before the web changed everything—the odds were pretty decent that…
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The e-scooter isn't new – London was zooming around on Autopeds a century ago
The e-scooters that clutter up pavements may seem like a new thing, but a hundred years ago, there were already people zooming around London on powered scooters.
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How Copyover MUD Servers Worked
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…
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Memories of .us
How much do you remember from elementary school? I remember vinyl tile floors, the playground, the teacher sentencing me to standing in the hallway. I had a teacher who was a chess fanatic; he painted a huge chess board in the paved schoolyard and got someone to fabricate big wooden chess pieces. It was enough of an…
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The Boring Part of Bell Labs
How Bell Labs supported itself between moonshots
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How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
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Photographs of the Old West
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
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Why the original Macintosh had a screen resolution of 512×324
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic…
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Oldest recorded transaction
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
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Classic 8×8-pixel B&W Mac patterns
TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the...
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Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time
How many times are words, names or functions found in the Linux kernel source code? Browse an example or write your own comma-separated list to find out! You can use * for wildcards, foo|bar for sums, and a word is defined as \<[[:alnum:]_]+\> (ignoring case, considering accents).
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The Family Bass - Music with an NES
I connected a Family BASIC keyboard to an NES via a bespoke adapter in order to play its unique triangle waveform live.
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Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
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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)
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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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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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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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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 ...