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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
This is the second section of the third part of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries, t…
In the Soyuz space missions, cosmonauts tracked their position above the Earth with a remarkable electromechanical device with a rotating ...
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.
So when did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
11 years ago to the day, I was at a tech conference. It was 3 year after the iPhone had launched its app SDK. Those of us who had been in the mobile game a while had already spent years developing apps for Symbian, BlackBerry, Windows CE, and at least a dozen other OSes which I've since scrubbed from my memory. But…
Changing from part numbers had benefits for Intel, but it took time
Alexander the Great tread in the footsteps of forgotten Greeks
Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, maki…
The git repo as art.
As you may know, back in 2007 I ressurected the development of GrafX2 . this old pixelart program, made only for DOS, was left out 6 years earlier by the authors, that had moved on to more modern computers. Today, graFX2 is amongst the best tool for pixelling, particularly on Linux or other alternative operating…
One under-appreciated characteristic of early microprocessors is the difficulty of distributing power inside the integrated circuit. While...
Douglas Self, clockwork, tram, Leveaux,
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fai...
This is the continuation of the third part of our three(ish) part (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc) series looking at the role of the general in commanding pre-gunpowder armies in battle. Last time we look…
The home computer presents itself through several interfaces, some in software, some in hardware. While it is mostly assumed that these interfaces’ goals are to expose the computing capabilities of the system to its user, obviously interfaces are at the same time responsible for transporting the image of the machine.
The 386sx wasn't much of an upgrade from the 286, but was popular for a time. Let's take a look at the 286 vs 386sx, and what the SX offered.
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
Vintage computers and retro gaming
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…
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
“If the Black Death caused the Renaissance, will COVID also create a golden age?”
