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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
It was a dark day when Islam met the loudspeaker. All travelers to the Middle East discover that this normally self-assured religion gets insecure in the small hours of night and feels it has to rehearse its foundational beliefs, in public, at 190 dB.
As Atari’s best-selling arcade game of all time, Asteroids was literally a game changer. Released in December 1979, it was responsible for catapulting Atari into mainstream public consciousne…
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
TfL has released a batch of documents which show almost every underground station in glorious 3D format.
From the closing panel at the 1995 Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium , featuring Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Ted Nelson, and Tim Berners-Lee.
A behind-the-scenes look at the development of Apple's Lisa.
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.
Underneath the London Underground, lies another city
BeOS browser : TLS apocalypse Won't keep it off line. (How do you pronounce BeOS ?) This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise s...
This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, ...
Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing …
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.
The first "pro" ST
On the thirty-first anniversary of the Chernobyl nuclear accident, the biggest man-made environmental disaster in written history, over one hundred people from the former Soviet Union shared their …
I'm very interested in the history of Dungeons & Dragons , but I'm not a historian – especially when compared to someone like Jon Peterson. ...
On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to…
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
Update December 2015: This project has now ended and the floppy era is over - for me at least. The project has been featured quite a bit in the press and blogosphere. Most notably: BBC World Service (14min12sek in) CBC Spark Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK) Dagbladet (national newspaper) While mass production of…
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) had a key role in the Apollo Moon mission, guiding and controlling the Saturn V rocket. Like most...
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…
Didn't you ever wish your<br>computer understood you?
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
