1981
Sam Bankman-Fried vs. the Match King
The similarities between Ivar Kreuger and Sam Bankman Fried.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
1982
BBC Micro, ancestor to ARM
Meet my BBC Master, plus 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and three-button mouse
1983
“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
1984
0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE (2003)
Tuesday, January 28, 2003 0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE Recently, the origin of the magic numbers of 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE came up in an email conversation between a number of ex-NeXT folks. Specifically, someone asked what the origin of the two magic numbers were in the context of mach-o file formats and why had Java…
1985
BASIC was not just a programming language
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
1986
Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)
An english translation of Edsger W. Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV.
1987
Retro 5″ Black and White TV as a computer monitor – A tale of pointlessness
The convoluted and ultimately pointless tale of how I connected a retro 80s 5" BW TV to my PC as a 3rd monitor
1988
Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
1989
LiveCode is a modern day HyperCard (2019)
AndreGarzia.com website
1990
How Crossrail was affected by the curvature of the Earth (2018)
Crossrail's tunnels under London are long, so long that when they were being planned, they were affected by something you might not expect -- the curvature of the earth.
1991
Sierra Gets Creative
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
1992
This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
A Celebration of Donald E Knuth
1993
How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021)
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
1994
Compiling a Mac OS 8 Application on MacOS Sierra
A light hearted look back at my time programming in the 1990s as I try to get an old Minesweeper implementation of mine from 1999, written in C++ using PowerPlant for Mac OS 8, compiling in Xcode 8 and running on macOS Sierra.
1995
How to raise a Roman army: The dilectus
This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Sci…
1996
Keyboards from my collection (2023)
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
1997
1998
Building and using a 29-year-old compiler on a modern system
In this post I’ll share my experience of building and using one of the earliest versions of the GNU C Compiler — GCC 1.27 (released in 1988) on a modern system.
1999
Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
2000
2001
A brief history of Dell Unix (2008)
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
2002
Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface.
2003
A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
2004
2004 RuneScape fit a multiplayer RPG into 56k dial-up
In 2004 I played too much RuneScape on a 56k modem that died the moment Mum picked up the phone. A 3D world, up to a couple of thousand players on a server, dozens on screen at once - in the browser, on 5 kilobytes per second. It worked. Let’s follow a single step and see how.
2005
Commodore 64 Ads from the 1980s
Computer magazine advertisements from the 1980s were just plain fantastic.
2006
September 11th That You Have Never Seen
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
2007
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently , I'm not alone .
2008
2009
German university life seen through American eyes, 1900-1901
Rich description of aspects of academic life from student through professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1900-01.
2010