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The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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What's worked in Computer Science: 1999 vs. 2015 (2015)
In 1999, Butler Lampson gave a talk about the past and future of “computer systems research” . Here are his opinions from 1999 on "what worked".
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How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
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.
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The 3D Software Rendering Technology of 1998's Thief: The Dark Project (2019)
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.
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What can be learned from studying long gone development practices?
Current ideas about the best way of building a software system are heavily influenced by the ideas that captured the attention of previous generations of developers. Can anything of practical use be learned from studying long gone techniques for building software systems?
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The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
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TI-83 Plus One More
Repair of a TI-83 Plus calculator with a non-working screen
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What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
On April 17, MakerBot laid off 20% of its staff . That's a big deal to me as I've been wondering what happened to the MakerBot I used to admire . Years ago, I looked up to the MakerBot team as a role model of how to run an open hardware company. Bre Pettis, MakerBot co-founder and former CEO, had given many talks and…
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Blacksmithing and Lisp
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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Turning an iPad Pro into a classic Macintosh
I’ve started work on the next in my 1-bit Woodblocks series: “Tekagami” (Ito Shinsui’s “Hand Mirror”). So it’s a good time to talk about how I turned an iPad...
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Aaron Swartz "JSTOR" case indictment revised/expanded
I'm continuing to follow the Aaron Swartz case , which is grinding away (disclosure: I know him socially, and have admired his work). The latest development, which seems to have not been reported anywhere but here (scoop! :-) breaking story! :-)), is that the prosecution has issued a "Superseding Indictment" . That…
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Douglas Adams on Hypercard and new educational models
Douglas Adams on Hypercard + New Educational Models
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Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
Knuth knows how to maintain information hygeine.
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Building Photoshop 1.0
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
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How Thomas Jefferson prepared for meetings
Here's an interesting historical anecdote from Karl Fogel's Producing Open Source Software on the value of preparing for meetings. In his multi-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, Jefferson and His Time, Dumas Malone tells the story of how Jefferson handled the first meeting held to decide the organization of the…
1638
The Rise and Fall of the Manufactured Home – Part I
A recurring theme of this newsletter is the failure of prefabrication (building homes in factories instead of on-site) to revolutionize the housing industry.
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Is stuff online worth saving?
I’ll admit, the question took me back a bit. But I’d say yes, it is.
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
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Mac SE/30 Odyssey
I’ve always wanted an Apple Macintosh SE/30 . Released in 1989, they look quite a lot like the other members of the original “compact Mac” series, but pack in a ton of interesting features that the other compact Macs don’t have.
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The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)
This post explains how Amazon replaced ISBNs with ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) for its Catalog Database Key
1650
Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco