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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.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 298 posts.
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When did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
So when did POP and IMAP become a “legacy protocol?”
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Writing an app is like coding for LaserDisc
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…
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Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIb: Officers
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…
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
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3D Diagrams of London Underground Stations
TfL has released a batch of documents which show almost every underground station in glorious 3D format.
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Going where BeOS NetPositive hasn't gone before: NetPositive+
BeOS browser : TLS apocalypse Won't keep it off line. (How do you pronounce BeOS ?) This is a real 133MHz BeBox running otherwise s...
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Predicting the tide with an analog computer made from Lego
Didn't you ever wish your<br>computer understood you?
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Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
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The cult of Amiga and SGI, or why workstations matter
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
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What caused the hallucinations of the Oracle of Delphi?
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
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Confirmed the MOS 7600/7601 Pong chip is a true microcontroller
In a previous article I discussed the MOS 7600 and 7601 "Pong in a chip" ICs, manufactured by MOS Technology (of the famous 6502) and act...
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The Great Renaming 1985 – 1988 (2000)
The Great Renaming FAQ
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The Last Ridge Racer
Well, this is a bit of a roller coaster tale that I’ve been meaning to share for a while. Before we start, let’s take a trip into the history books to set the scene. In October 1993, Na…
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A prominent composer lost his Wikipedia page
Bruce Faulconer deserves better, but the system seems rigged against him
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Programming in 1987 versus Today
Many developers today have no idea what programming was like in the 80s.
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The German School of Lisp (2011)
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.
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Pre-Modern Battlefields (2015)
Image Source.”Man does not enter battle to fight, but for victory. He does everything that he can to avoid the first and obtain the second” –Ardant du Picq, Battle Studies: Ancien…
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Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
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Discworld on Page and Screen, Part 1: Serious Comedy
One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”
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Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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How Websites Die
I recently started compiling a list of defunct blogging platforms . It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.
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Why wasn’t the steam engine invented earlier? Part III
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books
A look at three relics of a not-quite-bygone era. In picture-listicle form.
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Do you remember Ultima Online?
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when... Not really; I wish I were there, but I joined as soon as I could.
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If one GUI's not enough for your SPARC workstation, try four
Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workst...