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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
The year is 1983, and several Apple employees visit Brown University, and get some idea of what Universities want in a computer for the coming future. The big buzz of the era was the so called 3M machine:
Ever wonder how many people currently have the enigmatic Q Clearance, the required security clearance for access to nuclear secrets? Well, I found out.
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
More than raw factual errors, I’m interested in how science and scientists are depicted and how it influences peoples’ opinions of science as a process. You can’t see lasers and X…
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…
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…
Rabbit Waves
This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
In this document, I describe what is, in my humble but correct opinion, the best known algorithm for threading messages (that is, grouping messages together in parent/child relationships based on which messages are replies to which others.) This is the threading algorithm that was used in Netscape Mail and News 2.0…
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox . The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern…
McZee meets a penguin!
What’s the real reason that cellphone manufacturers stopped fitting this simple, robust connector?
I set up a Retro PC recently. One of the reasons I did this is because I was inspired by this thread:
Question for Quote Investigator: The relationship between bankers and borrowers is symbiotic and occasionally counter-intuitive. Here is a pertinent adage:
One of my colleagues is ex Bloomberg. He tells me there's only one thing I need to know about them: "25 million lines of Fortran !" Apparently they have 1500 coders firefightin…
The legacy of Solferino is in more danger than ever
A version of the paper below was published in Celebrating the 50th anniversary of Lisp , edited by Charlotte Herzeel, the conference record of Lisp50 @ OOPSLA’08 (Nashville, Tennessee, USA, 2008). That collection is available through the ACM Digital Library .
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
I am joining three academic research web sites, SIFT and Polyphen (websites for predicting disease mutations) and CRAVAT (a website for predicting cancer mutations), in a moment of silence to mark Aaron Swartz’ passing. On January 25, we will bring down our sites for the day to honor his contributions and mark the…
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frame...
There's a great deal said about Ada, Countess of Lovelace that I find misguided. And, worse, the real intellectual triumph of Lovelace is ...
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
