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How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
A Newspaper Classifieds Story
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
1502
The biggest churches in the world: Anglo-Norman eleventh-century cathedrals
Usually the idea of what a cathedral ought to be, that is, a colossal church building with a vast hall-like interior verging on the sublime, is said to originate in France in the twelfth century. A…
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Reflections on DOOM's Development
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for
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What Happened in the 2010s
My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? 😕 — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019 And so I will. Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is […]
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The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
1507
When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
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The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
I am one of those people who think about the Roman Empire daily – possibly out of my worrying addiction to Crusader Kings III and similar games. I also spent some time working on estimating economic complexity , a neat measure that can be used to explain economic development trajectories. One fateful day, I was…
1510
More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
1511
AOL pretends to be the internet
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […]
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The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
1514
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.
1515
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
1516
11,000-year-old sculpture of man riding a leopard found in Turkey
A unique statue depicting a human sitting on the back of a leopard has been unearthed from the Neolithic site of Karahan Tepe near Şanlıurfa, southern Turkey. The figure is 70 cm (27.6 inches) high and was discovered in what archaeologists believe was its original location: on a stone platform along the wall of a…
1517
I'm writing a history of Visual Basic, Chapter 1 is up
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…
1518
GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, is one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish a home page on the World Wide Web.
1519
UK government declines to pardon Alan Turing
There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...
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NetBSD on a JavaStation
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
1523
Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)
1524
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...
1525
Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
1526
Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
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Glucoboy
Emulating the unknown: Blood testing device for the GBA
1530
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…