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The Story of Heroku
Heroku made it easy for any developer to build and run applications in the cloud without managing their own infrastructure. Now, 15 years later, it continues to inspire the next generation of developers.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 298 posts.
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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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The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
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The Changes for the 2nd Edition of “Code”
Whenever a 2nd edition of a book is published, people ask “I already have the 1st edition. Do I need to get the 2nd?” It’s a legitimate question and I’ve asked it myself. Reading a 2nd edition after the 1st is not trivial: It’s a commitment of both additional money and additional time.
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Listerine Royalties
With an iron-clad court ruling, Listerine royalties represent a uniquely enduring cash-flowing asset.
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Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky , the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted…
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Not as famous as they should be (2021)
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
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Intel 286 secrets: ICE mode and F1 0F 04
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
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A seamstress who solved the ancient mystery of the Argonaut
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
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What happened to Tandy computers
Tandy took a chance in 1984 and it paid off, then they played it safe too long
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The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
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If the news is fake, imagine history
Access to the Network has changed our perception of the present and the perception of the past.
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Commodore 900: Unix-like workstation/server that was eclipsed by Amiga (2020)
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
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Somali Law (2013)
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Memories: Edinburgh ML to Standard ML
Dave MacQueen (with Robert Harper and John Reppy) has written a 100-page History of Standard ML . Here I offer my brief, personal and utterly subjective impressions of its early days, up to the deeply unfortunate schism that created what was then called Caml . Standard ML was a tragic missed opportunity. But even…
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How Did Elevators Lose Their Music?
My informal survey reveals the decline of an insipid but historic genre
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Everyone should learn the slide rule (2021)
The obsolescence of the slide rule is mostly un-mourned, but as with many technological obsolescences, we have lost something valuable with its demise. The type of thinking which goes along with us…
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How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is
Texts on this and that.
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X-ray reverse-engineering a hybrid module from 1960s Apollo test equipment
In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But fir...
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The strange case of BeOS, SRS and the silent Power Mac 6500
Tonight's story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn't make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound...
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Unix's technical history is mostly old now
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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Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
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Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.