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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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What Made Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem Hard to Prove
Roughly speaking, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proven. When I was in 11-th grade, my geometry teacher Mr. Olsen, my friend …
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Failure Mechanisms in Democratic Regimes – An Army's Role
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
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Franklin's bad ads for Apple II clones and the beloved impersonator they depict
A beloved hometown impersonator had no idea what he was signing up for with this photoshoot.
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Why Skyscrapers Became Glass Boxes
Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate…
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When is a PC not a PC? The PC-98
I’ve covered PC compatibility in the past, and tried to explain how just having an x86 CPU and running DOS does not necessarily make your machine compatible with an IBM PC. At the time, this …
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Soviet Calculator History (1998)
The first mechanical device used in Russia for computational purposes was the Russian abacus ( schoty ). This device became "the national calculator" and was used in cashier's offices down to the middle of the 90's. It is interesting to note that the textbook "Trade calculations" published in 1986 devotes a whole…
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The Z-80 has a 4-bit ALU. Here's how it works.
The 8-bit Z-80 processor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and it is s...
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
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The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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What if Tunisia had a revolution, but nobody watched?
On December 17, a 26 year old Tunisian man named Mohamed Bouazizi reached the end of his rope. An unemployed university graduate, Bouazizi had become a seller of fruits and vegetables in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. When authorities confiscated his wares to punish him for selling without a license…
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SVG Mask Artwork of the Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 after 44 years: scalable vector mask artwork, Rubylith cutters, replica PCB rev 2, printer emulator code.
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Depackaging the Nintendo 3DS CPU
If you haven't read my Nintendo 3DS intro blog post first, I'd suggest it as it's a fun short read that gives some backstory of my interest...
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Project Xanadu: Even More Hindsight (2025)
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
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A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
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Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…
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The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
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Visualizing Commodore 1541 Disk Contents
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
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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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The Decline and Fall of the Latin Neuter
Reading time: 15 minutes There are many significant differences between Latin and its linguistic descendants, the Romance languages. One that stands out from the rest is grammatical gender. Latin h…
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How much GNU is there in GNU/Linux?
After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for size of a…
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Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? (2019)
At long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here)…
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The last new subway line in Japan
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…