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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
We've all been there, right? You debug something, you try telnet to see if a port is open, and now you're stuck in a telnet session.
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth?
Data-driven approach to history
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
Hermann Ludwig Heinrich Count of Pückler-Muskau was born in 1785 to the Earl Pückler and was later granted sovereignty over his land by King Friedrich III. His fame is unbroken today, but not because of his political power, but because his house chef named a dessert after him. In German and Dutch, the now popular…
Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one. While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that…
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026.
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
How a Hertfordshire research lab quietly transformed an iconic British staple food, and the complexion of the countryside - without anyone actually noticing
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
by James Wallace Harris, Friday, January 6, 2017 I first read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder just after it came out in 1981, before it won the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 1982. …
The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley
A statistical test of whether the Sumerian King List's antediluvian reigns line up with paleoclimate events better than chance.
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
Several years ago, I said I would no longer publicly comment about my time in 1996–1997 as Amazon.com's catalog manager. Why? Because my knowledge and memory were so out of date, and I did not keep a journal during that period. It would be silly for me
