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You know more Finnish than you think
Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, maki…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
182
Atari Means Business with the Mega ST
The first "pro" ST
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Refurb Weekend: Silicon Graphics Indigo² Impact 10000
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
184
The Lost Japanese ROM of the Macintosh Plus
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions . But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM. I’m…
185
The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
186
Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
This would be my website, I guess.
187
Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
188
The JAWS shark is public domain
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
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A train-sized tunnel is now carrying electricity under South London
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
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Ancient law requires a bale of straw to hang from Charing Cross rail bridge
The scaffolding surrounding the Charing Cross railway bridge has received an addition – two bales of hay/straw – because an ancient law requires it.
191
A story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home…
192
Racintosh Plus – Rackmount Mac Plus
I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving…
193
The British Micro Behemoth
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
194
Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
195
A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
196
What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
197
50 years of proof assistants
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
198
Why is C the symbol for the speed of light? (2004)
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
199
The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
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Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis
Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5. i reverse-engineered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5! check it out at github.com/schlae/cm5-r... [image or embed] — Tube Time…
203
Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
With a map!
204
BBC Micro, ancestor to ARM
Meet my BBC Master, plus 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and three-button mouse
205
Keyboards from my collection (2023)
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
206
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…
207
The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
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…
208
Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook
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…
209
The Humble Programmer (1972)
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…
210
East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.