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Imperial Wars Always Come Home
There’s a person I think about from time to time.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Philip Anderson 1923-2020
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
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Myst: the Drawbacks to Success
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
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The Secret Origin of the Action RPG
Who knew that the knowledge of the true progenitor of the action RPG would be hidden in a stuffy basement in Akihabara, Tokyo?
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Reverberations: An 8-bit approach to J.S. Bach
The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…
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Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
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Sun's NeWS was a mistake, as are all toolkit-in-server windowing systems (2013)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
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Using a Piece of Paper as a Display Terminal – Ed vs. Vim
This article will focus on discussing why the ancient text editor 'ed' works the way it does.
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Cloning a 6502 Apple-1 in just 930 logic gates
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
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Scottish Nitroglycerin and One Legged Stools (2014)
Main Menu - click above Man, thermometer, one legged stool & vat of nitro 1870 . Alfred Nobel chose Ardeer, in Ayreshire, as the ...
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The History of Usenet and FidoNet
Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became …
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Die analysis of the 8087 math coprocessor's fast bit shifter
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
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Bread, How Did They Make It?
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! This essay will hopefully be the first post in a series (II, III, IV, A) covering some of th…
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Die shrink: How Intel scaled down the 8086 processor
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
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The election of the doge
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
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Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
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ECMAScript 4: The Missing Version
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
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What if the Trinity test had failed?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
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The Making of Stunt Island
It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…
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The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
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Smalltalk-87
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
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Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User
Thirty five years ago I became an Amiga user. One of the first, actually. This is a meandering and reminiscent post of sorts, written to mark the Amiga’s 35th birthday and the 35 years I have known and loved the … Continue reading →
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C Programming on System 6 – Intro [video]
I've been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling's excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I'd start screencasting some of my work.