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Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
How an Apple legend approached the world’s most powerful psychedelic as a user-experience problem to be solved.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I ...
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Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys
I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…
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Geniuses of the past were aristocratically tutored
Aristocratic tutoring I: Explaining the decline of genius
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Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
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The 3dfx Voodoo1
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
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The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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A History of IDEs at Google
Laurent Le Brun's blog
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Make Linux look like Windows 95
Blasphemy? Probably! But still pretty awesome!
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The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
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How I coded in 1985
Back in 1985 I worked on the computerization of a machine designed to stick labels on bottles. The company that made the machines was using...
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Lego Macintosh Classic with e‑paper display
*tl;dr: I built a Wi-Fi enabled LEGO Macintosh Classic running Docker on a Raspberry Pi Zero with an e‑paper display. Docker deployments via resin.io. photos
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Kottke.org is 25 years old today
I realize how it sounds, but I’m going to say it anyway because it’s the truth. When I first clapped eyes on the World Wide Web, I fell in love. Here’s how I de
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A Constructive Look at TempleOS
TempleOS is somewhat of a legend in the operating system community. Its sole author, Terry A. Davis , has spent the past 12 years attempting to create a new operating from scratch. Terry explains that God has instructed him to construct a temple , a 640x480 covenant of perfection. Unfortunately Terry also suffers from…
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Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Same people, 13 years later.
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Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
169
The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...
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"Nothing like this will be built again"
I've just had a really amazing experience: a guided tour of the nuclear reactor complex at Torness on the Scottish coast. What made this tour unusual is that the tour guide in question, Les, happens to be one of the reactor engineers (as well as a friend) -- and he showed me (and a couple of other friends) right…
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The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so
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How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
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Obituary for Cyc
After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence.
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X-COM
X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase…
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Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
Or, the JAM stack.
177
A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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Windows 95 – How Does It Look Today?
Windows 95 was the “next generation” OS from Microsoft: redesigned UI, long file names support, 32-bit apps and many other changes. Some…
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Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.