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Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2642
The First Three Discworld Games
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464 , which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word…
2643
Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
2644
Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...
2645
Follow This Rule — If You Want To Be Popular (1922)
Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine, something that is just as true today as back then. In fact, it probably has even m…
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
2648
Egyptian Fractions (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
2649
Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
2650
A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…
2651
Turbinia – An Uninvited Guest (2014)
Turbinia - An Uninvited Guest
2652
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…
2653
Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer…
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
2656
Ford 021C Concept Car (1999)
Marc Newson has been described as one of the most influential designers of his generation. He has worked across an extremely wide range of disciplines, and his clients include some of the best-known and most prestigious brands in the world spanning diverse sectors from manufacturing and technology to transportation…
2657
Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
2658
Alan Turing using math to repair his bike
Audio Link With the arrival of summer weather in many parts of the U.S., it’s time to think again about various outdoor activities. Wat...
2659
The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
2660
Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
2661
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
James Boswell and the Nature of Genius
2662
The analog computer for the Nike missile system (2001)
Nike computer - Installed in class room, not BC van. From Rolf Goerigk Left rack has the power supplies - outputs about 7 different voltages. Top panel is switches, meters, voltage warning lights. (Note: in the van installation, this rack is on the right side of the computer.) Middle two racks - operational amplifies…
2663
Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979
Teletypes may have killed a lot of forests by emitting every line to hard copy instead of a screen, but there's something to be said for t...
2664
Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
2665
The Rise of Steel Part II
Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II.
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Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64
2668
PC-XT Emulator on a ESP8266 (2018)
Can you run a 8086 PC-XT emulation with 640K RAM, 80×25 CGA composite video and a 1.44MB MS-DOS disk on a ESP12E without additional components? Yes, you can and I did. The CPU emulator is a po…
2669
How Not to Redact a Warhead
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
2670
Abel, the Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein