2101
Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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2103
How factories were made safe
The fundamental cause was a wrong attitude towards the core question: who is responsible for safety?
2104
If only Borland had stuck with Turbo Modula-2 for CP/M (2013)
I have written previously about why Turbo Pascal is a Great Choice For Programming Under CP/M and now it is time to talk about what could have been. You probabl
2105
iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
2106
Kevin Mitnick Hacked California Law in 1983
Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the Wires. The setup is that he just discovered that there’s warrant for his arrest by the California Youth Authority, and he’s trying to…
2107
The Decade of Deep Learning
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
2110
The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part I: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate
This is the long-awaited first part of a series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers…
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2112
It was all downhill after the Cuecat
Sometime in 2001, I walked into a Radio Shack on San Francisco's Market Street and asked for a Cuecat: a handheld barcode scanner that looked a bit like a cat and a bit like a sex toy. The clerk handed one over to me and I left, feeling a little giddy. I didn't have to pay a cent.
2113
10 Years of Nukemap
NUKEMAP was released into the world a decade ago, believe it or not.
2114
Why airplane windows have round corners (2016)
It's to prevent them from killing you
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Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle's I/O Processor
The Space Shuttle's five 1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands o...
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2118
Dirt in Medieval Books
When you use something for a thousand years, it is bound to get dirty. Medieval books often show stains and marks on their pages, usually from readers who did not always take very good care of the …
2119
C64 Theremin
The Theremin is one of the earliest electronic instruments. It's played by moving one's hands in front of two antennas: One controls pitch and the other controls volume.
2120
Was BASIC that horrible or better?
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
2121
America, 1926: A forgotten 100-year-old report
America in 1926 was obsessed with technology, immigration, women, work, and money. Sound familiar?
2122
Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
2123
Netheads vs. bellheads redux: the strange victory of SIP over the telephone
How much do you know about how the PSTN (that is, the public telephone network) works? At some point long long ago, it was signalled using in-band frequencies, which facilitated the infamous phreaking using so-called “blue boxes”. This led to a switch to out of band signalling, ultimately culminating in something…
2124
The myth of Snow Leopard
It was a hot mess, but the myth is useful today.
2125
The time SUSE, the German Linux company, banned mentioning Jewish holidays
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
2126
Windows 95 released August 24, 1995
People lined up around stores at midnight like they do for a new Apple product.
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Run Windows 2000 on a DEC Alpha with a new es40 fork
Published: 05-07-2026 20:33 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
2129
Is This a Tank?
Building on last week’s post on tanks and a few of the comments there, this week I wanted to talk about the ancient (and medieval) weapon-systems often analogized to tanks and the degree to w…
2130
Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)
Not much is known about Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870), yet he was one of the first scholars to publish voluminous editions and translations of Old English texts. This blog provides an overview of Tho…