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Meshtastic 64 – A meshtastic radio for the Commodore 64
For this project I designed and built a meshtastic radio that plugs directly into the Commodore 64. My goal was to release this at the VCF M...
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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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The Early History of Usenet, Part I: The Technological Setting
Usenet—Netnews—was conceived almost exactly 40 years ago this month. To understand where it came from and why certain decisions were made the way they were, it’s important to understand the technological constraints of the time.
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Gambiarra: repair culture (2015)
Maker culture has gained a lot of ground in the last few years. Maybe too much, in fact. We can of course ignore those people who are only, as always, surfing the current wave of hype. They seldom have any clue of the ideas they are selling themselves with anyway. But it also feels as though everybody else is talking…
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
We all have stories, as engineers, of fixing some crazy thing at the last minute right before the demo goes up. We have all encountered situations where we needed to fix something that was our fault and we needed to fix it now.
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The Internet Arcade
When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side).…
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Reverse engineering circuitry in a Spacelab computer from 1980
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and exper...
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Reverberations: An 8-bit approach to J.S. Bach
The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…
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Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
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100 years of Zermelo's axiom of choice: What was the problem with it? (2006)
Cantor conceived set theory in a sequence of six papers published in the Mathematische Annalen during the five year period 1879–1884. In the fifth of these papers, published in 1883, 1 he stated as a law of thought ( Denkgesetz ) that every set can be well-ordered or, more precisely, that it is always possible to…
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Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.
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Duckspeak vs. Smalltalk: Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple (2011)
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
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The Texas Instruments TMX 1795: the first, forgotten microprocessor
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
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Lynx Browser: The Land That Time Revived (2022)
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever." Lynx br...
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A Personal History of APL (1982)
October 1982 TR-03.214 A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL by Michael S. Montalbano International Business Machines Corporation General Products Division Santa Teresa Laboratory San Jose, California A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL Introduction I have several reasons for calling this talk a personal history. For one, I want to make it…
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Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
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The curious Soviet mini-sub of South Alabama (2018)
While running around South Alabama, I came across the sleepy shrimping capital of Bayou La Batre along the Mississippi Sound. The basis for Winston Groom’s (who grew up in Mobile County and f…
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The Ruin of War
This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last week, we lo…
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The largest computer ever built
While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in physica…
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Edge of Emulation: Game Boy Sewing Machines (2020)
Emulating the unknown: Controlling Sewing Machines with a Game Boy
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Examining the core memory module inside a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe
The IBM 1401 mainframe computer was announced in 1959 and by the mid-1960s had become the best-selling computer , extremely popular with me...
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The Most Wonderful Map in the World: Urbano Monte's Planisphere of 1587
At some point in 1589, a Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made up his mind: his self-portrait needed updating. Monte carefully ...
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Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers
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The Beginnings of FM Radio Broadcasting (2018)
The beginnings of FM radio broadcasting in the USA
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What Did Bohr Do at Los Alamos?
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.