Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 244 posts.
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
A blog about software craft and quality
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
Apple’s ill-fated Copland operating system is notoriously hard to run on real hardware, and has not previously been available in emulation. Here is the last build, D11E4 from June 1996, in an improved DingusPPC.
A blog about software craft and quality
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
McZee meets a penguin!
This is not a replica of Terry Pratchett’s study. To do that, I would have needed pictures from every angle and exact measurements, so this is just a small part of a study, where Terry Pratchett might have felt at home, in scale 1:12. If you read “The Borrowers" as…
Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.
In 1998 Looking Glass Studios released the stealth game Thief: The Dark Project . This was just as 3D hardware acceleration was taking off, so due to the development cycle it didn't use hardware acceleration; it was a purely software-rendered game.
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Changing from part numbers had benefits for Intel, but it took time
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
An unused railway electrical control room in Surrey.
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
How a conversation on a plane in 1953 set in motion the stack that eventually processes tens of thousands of flight bookings per second, and why that stack is still here.
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
Driving on Route-25a through East Shoreham, you’d never guess there was anything unusual about the gated road heading off toward the coast. But go down a ways… …and suddenly, it’ll appear through the trees… Long Island’s only nuclear power plant, closed and shuttered since it was decommissioned in 1994. Today, it sits…
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
