2011
Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2012
Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
A list of things any decent Tolkien fan should avoid, ignore, despise and never ever share except for enlightening people they are getting it wrong. Thanks!
2013
Stranger Things and the Amiga 1000
About a year ago, I cancelled my Netflix subscription. One of the few shows listed on the "plus" side when I made my decision was Stranger Things: an entertaining series with an excellent first and good second season. In short, I'm a fan of the show - though my appreciation of it doesn't come near my fanatical passion…
2014
Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
2015
DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
2016
2017
10NES
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
2018
Mediagenic (or, the Patent from Hell)
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
2019
Good times create weak men (2019)
Software abstraction ladder becomes too tall and starts to fall
2020
Hispaniola's great divergence
Why are Haiti and the DR so different?
2021
Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
2022
2023
A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
2024
Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
2025
The Almost Romance Languages
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
2026
2027
2028
How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube
Yesterday, the web celebrated its 25th birthday and to join in, I have a little story. A couple of years ago I found a NeXTcube. I'm not going to say where it is to avoid vandalism (the computer is publicly accessible under some circumstances without much oversight), but this is the story. Sir Tim Berners-Lee…
2029
Where did you go, Ms. Pac-Man?
We lost the female counterpart to Pac-Man in 2020, but Namco had been plotting her demise years beforehand.
2030
An 8-tube module from a 1954 IBM 705 mainframe: it's a key debouncer
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
2031
German state parliament bans laptops - Pirate party show up with typewriters
This website is for sale! crackajack.de is your first and best source for information about crackajack. Here you will also find topics relating to issues of general interest. We hope you find what you are looking for!
2032
Feynman's Clock
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
2033
Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
2034
Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
2035
Graphics Tricks from Boomers
Technical details about a recent 4096bytes Atari-STE intro, by Arnaud Carré
2036
Two player Karateka using a 42 byte patch
One of the first games I ever played on my family’s Apple IIe was the Jordan Mechner master work, Karateka . Fight the bad guys, save the princess – it’s a simple but classic formula. My brother and I would take turns making our way through Akuma’s fortress. Even then, we wanted a two player version.
2037
The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
2038
On the Women’s Petition Against Coffee of 1674
“That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by th...
2039
2040
Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This week we are starting the first of a four (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) part look at pre-modern textile prod…