1771
Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
1772
Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
1773
The Heart of Unix (2018)
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
1774
The Invention of Zero
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”
1775
1776
Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
1777
How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
When an experiment with existing open source technology just cherry-picks results to make it look good
1778
“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
1779
The Great Renaming 1985 – 1988 (2000)
The Great Renaming FAQ
1780
Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner
This post will explore the famous winner of the first IOCCC contest, dive into the story behind the code, and even display the original source programs!
1781
The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
1782
The C64 Dead Test Font
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
1785
1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
1786
Decoding the NEC V20 Microcode
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
1787
The Evolution of Tunnel Boring Machines
Tunneling is an important technology for modern civilization, as a tunnel is often the only reasonable way to create a direct path between two points.
1788
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021
Published: 28-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
1789
A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
1790
Donald Knuth used an Erlang-like notation
In this blogpost we'll see how Erlang's Syntax already appeared on TAOCP years before the language was even created.
1791
Margaret Mead, technocracy, and the origins of AI's ideological divide
The anthropologist helped popularize both techno-optimism and the concept of existential risk
1792
Building the Bell System
If someone was making a list of the most important American companies today, it’s unlikely AT&T would be anywhere near the top.
1793
The Shareware Scene, Part 4: Doom
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D ‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid…
1794
What Have We Learned from the PDP-11?
This post is a slightly edited version of my November presentation to the San Francisco chapter of Papers We Love.
1795
Being a kid making games in the early 2000s
An autobiographical essay by Jay Tholen about being a youngster making games and posting them online!
1796
Restoring YC's Xerox Alto: how our boot disk was trashed with random data
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
1797
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…
1798
The Many Faces of Berlin U-Bahn Line U7
When the U7 was completed in 1984, it was West Berlin’s longest underground line and the one with the greatest number of stations. Many of those stations, constructed at a time when the western hal…
1799
Today I Rescued 7,234 Old GIFs
As Web standards have moved on, a particular 1990s library of GIFs has been hard to effectively archive and was at risk of being lost forever. So I swooped in, wrote some hacky code, and now a few thousand low-res images have been saved for posterity. Hurrah, I guess?
1800
My trip to the Communication and Laptop Museum in Estonia
I ended up going to a small museum run by a passionate enthusiast in the beautiful countryside of south-east Estonia while on vacation, here are my notes on it.