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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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…
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
With a map!
All along the South African coast you find dolosse wherever coastal management is necessary to prevent tides and rough seas from eroding breakwaters, harbour walls, coastal construction. In Port El…
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms and algorithmic complexity. Not only does he point out the importance of understanding how many steps it will take to carry…
(Urs Graf 1517 Since the whole dress on my woodcut isn’t really visible and doesn’t provide any specific details, I collected woodcuts made by Urs Graf, and sorted them into chronologic…
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…
Around this time last year, I wrote a post dissecting the decline of The Simpsons from its peak in the mid 90s finding that the golden age of the show spanned an incredible 214 episodes. As a comparison, Friends, which seemed to have been on TV forever, managed 236 episodes...
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
One of the unwritten rules of the Internet seems to be that whenever something Amiga-related is mentioned, at least one Amiga fan (myself included) must show up and try to explain the concept of screens . Amiga screens can have different resolutions, we'll tell you, and one can drag them, we'll say, and other Amiga…
I recently helped repair the card reader for the Computer History Museum's vintage IBM 1401 mainframe. In the process, I learned a lot abou...
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!
This is the second part (I, II, III, IV, V) of a series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as …
West Berlin's lifeline during the Soviet Blockade, Tempelhof Airport has since become the city’s biggest park. Berliners will fight to keep it that way.
Cistercian numerals were invented by the Cistercian order of monks in the 13th century. Giuseppe Frisella explains how the notation system works: A vertical str
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Longtime readers may remember a previous article where we implemented TI-99/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language for modern computers. Recently I got nostalgic for the actual hardware so I got my 99 out of the closet where it had been for a decade o…
Last week’s adventures with the Exidy Sorcerer led me to write a Z80 version of the LZ4 decompressor I’d previously used on the SNES, the CoCo, and the Genesis. At this point, this has …
Tony Hoare at the LASER summer school, September 2007 (All photographs in this article are by the author) Had they included just one of Tony Hoare’s major achievements, many scientific careers would be considered prestigious enough. His had a long list, which I am going to try to summarize, not pretending to get…
Creating a quarter-scale replica of the iconic BeBox computer, complete with blinkenlights and custom case design
Collision and convergence in Truth and Beauty at the intersection of science and spirituality.
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
