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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in…
Success and Litigation
While programmers today take multiplication for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — multiplication r...
At long last, a real-world use case for AI!
What can it teach us?
As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west , I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I was showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210 , I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. It would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version …
Counterfeits CPU were very common in the mid-90s. The worst period was between 1993 (just after the launch of the Intel 486 DX2) and 1998 (when the Pentium II started to be multiplier-locked). It was extremely easy for tricksters to remove the original marking and reprint another one with a higher f
An illustrated description of what Textmode Art is and how to get started.
If you told Yamauchi Fusajiro that the little playing card business he had just started would one day sell video game consoles, he would have no idea what yo...
Let’s see how Gentoo is doing these days. Below is a plot of Gentoo’s rankings on DistroWatch :
In the fall of 1976 I started as a Freshman at SUNY Stony Brook intending to major in Math and Computer Science. I took Honors Calculus I a...
One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK, 1 which used a rotating globe to indicate...
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […]
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
The story of Sun Microsystems and the Java programming language
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978. This processor ended up being hugely influential, setting the path for the x86 architec...
Making glulam of the tree of knowledge.
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed…
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
These are posters warning of potential hazards on the railway. They were used for public relation relations at various stations to alert passengers and the gene
More than raw factual errors, I’m interested in how science and scientists are depicted and how it influences peoples’ opinions of science as a process. You can’t see lasers and X…
I set up a Retro PC recently. One of the reasons I did this is because I was inspired by this thread:
Douglas Adams on Hypercard + New Educational Models
Knuth knows how to maintain information hygeine.
This post explains how Amazon replaced ISBNs with ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) for its Catalog Database Key
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…
