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Restoring a 37 Year-Old IBM F Mechanical Keyboard
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
From 2019 on, the Latvian National Archive offers access to various KGB documents.The Archive digitized operation cases and also special KGB training manuals.
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The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the…
154
Book Review: Hoover
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
155
Lemmings 2: The Tribes
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
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The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
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NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
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LiveCode is a modern day HyperCard (2019)
AndreGarzia.com website
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Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
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The text adventure game of exiting a Telnet session
We've all been there, right? You debug something, you try telnet to see if a port is open, and now you're stuck in a telnet session.
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Lost Advanced Civilizations
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth?
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Why Military History?
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…
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Master of Magic
Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one. While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that…
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Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers
Brinch Hansen was one of the pioneers of concurrent programming and operating systems (kernels). In the 1960s, Brinch Hansen worked at the Danish computer company Regnecentralen, first in the compiler group headed by Peter Naur and Jørn Jensen, and, later, as the chief architect of the RC 4000 minicomputer and its…
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A Map of the Trees of London
Ever wondered what that tree is you passed during your lockdown exercise walk? There's a website that tells you the answer.
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Sanitation conquered disease long before vaccines or antibiotics
Of all the technologies against infectious disease, which mattered most? A data-driven approach
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Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound chip from die photos (2017)
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
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Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
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Was Knuth Really Framed?
Recently, the formal methods specialist Hillel Wayne posted an interesting article discussing whether Donald Knuth was actually framed when Jon Bentley asked him to demonstrate literate programming . (Knuth came up with an 8-page long monolithic listing, whereas in a critique Doug McIlroy provided a six line shell…
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War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants. Last time (here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so power…
176
Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
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Inside the 8086 processor, tiny charge pumps create a negative voltage
Introduced in 1978, the revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor led to the x86 processors used in most desktop and server computing today....
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Compaq and Coronavirus
Compaq’s descent from a company of action to a brand is a frightening parable for the the West’s focus on talk over action.
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Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
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What “Roguelike” Meant
Several recently released games have rekindled the old discussions on the meaning of the word “roguelike”. This post is an attempt to…