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Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
212
How We Knew Space Was a Vacuum (2021)
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
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How to raise a Roman army: The dilectus
This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Sci…
214
A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
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September 11th That You Have Never Seen
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
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German university life seen through American eyes, 1900-1901
Rich description of aspects of academic life from student through professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1900-01.
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10NES
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
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Good times create weak men (2019)
Software abstraction ladder becomes too tall and starts to fall
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The Almost Romance Languages
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
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Miles Davis: A candid conversation (1962)
Last Modified Sunday, 05-Aug-2018 12:53:53 EDT These pages were made by Justin R. Erenkrantz unless otherwise stated. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License . These pages will look best in an XHTML 1.0 compliant browser.
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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software
“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many…
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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
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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…
227
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
228
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…
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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…
230
The time SUSE, the German Linux company, banned mentioning Jewish holidays
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
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Building a Frankenstein 64
👶 From when Mosaic took over Gopher. 🏢 VP of Engineering @ Cloudflare 🕹️ Slightly addicted to retrocomputing 🔍 Hit Ctrl-K to Search
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A couple of messages about changes to ianVisits
I've been contacted a few times recently about the sharp decline in descriptive images on the events listings.
233
Teaching Apple Cyberdog 1.0 new tricks (featuring OpenDoc)
In the distant nethermists of time, documents once briefly ruled the earth (or at least Mac OS), and to that end I managed to find a verrr...
234
Man, Myth and Magic
Collect the set! I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagin…
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Understanding British Money: What's a Quid? A Shilling? (2020)
British money has a lengthy history, so it's not surprising that it's evolved and changed over the years. Whether you're watching British TV, reading British
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The origin of the law of torture: A cautionary tale
+ Ordeals and Plea Bargaining
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Emulating an iPod Touch 2G using QEMU
My personal website.
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MiniDisc Hacking
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
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OpenVMS 9.2 for x86 is finally available for hobbyists
Published: 09-04-2023 23:59 | Last update: 11-04-2023 22:29 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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SS United States, the fastest passenger liner ever built
The fastest passenger liner ever built, the SS United States was a joint undertaking by a civilian shipping line and the US Navy. SS United States, rusting away in Philadelphia photo from WikiCommo…