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The lost cause of the Lisp machines
I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will....
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
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Cray versus Raspberry Pi
Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk
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The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
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Work at the Mill: The story of Digital Equipment Corporation
Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
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The 8-Bit Era's Weird Uncle: The TI-99/4A
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…
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Why does my ripped CD have messed up track names? And why is one track missing?
A delve into CD ripping and metadata
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Sid Meier's Pirates – In-depth (2017)
In-depth written review with pictures of Sid Meier's Pirates! on the Amiga.
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When Jorge Luis Borges met one of the founders of AI
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, is one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish a home page on the World Wide Web.
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NetBSD on a JavaStation
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
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Windows 2 for the Apricot PC/Xi
(and Word, and Excel, and so much more) by Nina Kalinina, December 27th, 2025 (rev. 3.00 2026-01-04)
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Choose Your Own Adventure
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games .
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A brief history of the absurdities of the Soviet Union
In May 1991 a Soviet cosmonaut Sergei Krikalyev was sent into space. At the end of the year he was still circling around the Earth waiting for a spaceship to bring him back. He had left a Soviet Union that was still a superpower but would return to a world where there was no Soviet Union any more. The Soviet empire…
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What does it mean that MP3 is free?
The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without payin
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Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster
The Sound Blaster
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Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Favorite
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
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An engineering history of the Manhattan Project
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
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Bullfrog in the Dungeon
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
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Pixels in Islamic Art: Square Kufic Calligraphy (2020)
When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…
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History of Maths for Beginners
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
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The Joy of Nand2Tetris
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
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How a Forgotten Battle Created a More Peaceful World
The legacy of Solferino is in more danger than ever
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The origin and unexpected evolution of the word "mainframe"
What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frame...
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Blacksmithing and Lisp
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
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Kids who ran away to 1960s San Francisco
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
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