Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 263 posts.
Unicode definitely added a lot of complexity to string handling, and people who use languages with ASCII alphabets exclusively may think it's unjustified. However, I'm a non-ASCII language speaker who's old enough to remember the alternatives, and the alternatives are far worse than the complexity of Unicode.
Retrocomputing and other indulgences
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out t...
INTERVIEW BETWEEN: ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� DATE OF TAPE:
As you would imagine, a lot of the things you can do in a comedy game just don’t work when trying to remain serious. You can’t cover up a bad puzzle with a funny line of self-referential dialog. Er, not that I ever did that. But anyway, it was also a challenge to maintain the tone and some semblance of a dramatic arc…
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
I was 9 years old. A revision of the notebook containing my first Z80 assembly language program
Smackeyackys excellent adventure I was somewhere around eight or nine when the 8 bit era of personal computers started getting into action....
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill. While Be only off...
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
Implementing an 8080 emulator in a microservice architecture on top of kubernetes
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
The remains of four iron furnaces, operated by the Lackawanna Iron Works, are located in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The creation of the original Macintosh has been extensively studied and written about, but what happened after it launched? What was it like to own a Macintosh in the mid-eighties? I intend to tell this story of the Macintosh through the pages of MacUser.
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...
