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The Useful Personal Computer
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
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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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Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography (2016)
Thought we’d try something different this week. For the record, I am definitely a ‘point and click’ photographer – my mobile phone has always been my camera of choice. The e…
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Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
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Programming War Stories: macOS Freeware/Shareware (2019)
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in:
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When you have too much memory for SheepShaver
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...
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Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
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A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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Lovelace – The Origin
This brief biographical sketch was done for Ada Lovelace Day 2009. I think I in was a pub at the time.
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Pac-Man: How We Played the Game
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a “perfect game”. But until now, no one’s ever told you how people really played the…
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Explore the Silk Roads
Experience history's greatest journey along the veins of the world. Relive the interactive journey from Europe to China, explore the map of the Silk Roads, or choose an outpost to trave back in time to.
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Smalltalk-87
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Why Finland Selected the F-35A (2021)
Back in 2017 I was fortunate enough to travel to RAF Lossiemouth together with a bunch of Finnish media courtesy of BAE Systems to get up and close with the Eurofighter Typhoon group operating ther…
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The Power Mac 4400
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an…
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Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
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Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
This is, so far, the only article of mine that's been completely deleted from Wikipedia. I've salvaged a copy of it from Search.com , since it's gone from the site's history now, and am putting it here until I decide what else to do with it. Non-PC compatible x86 computers For much of the time that…
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Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
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The (Almost) Definitive 486DX/50 Article
(Source: Infoworld, 25th May 1992, p56) We need to start at the beginning, because understanding the timeline of the 486 - Intel's 4th gener...
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The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
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The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
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Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
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One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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My encounter with Medley Interlisp
Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship...
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Repairing a Bent Trombone Slide (2004)
The idea for constructing this series of pages on the technique and approach for slide action repair evolved steadily over the past several years. Many of our out of state clients that have never been to our shop have expressed great interest in just how we go about repairing their slides. Or what Daniel Oberloh…