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Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces
Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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10th Anniversary of JQuery
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of jQuery. I announced it back at BarCamp NYC 2006 when I was still in college. It’s incredible to think of how far it’s come and just how many people have contributed to its success. To them I am forever grateful, thank you.
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Bjarne Stroustrup on Dennis Ritchie: They said it couldn't be done, & he did it
What a sad week. Rob Pike reports that Dennis Ritchie also has passed away. Ritchie was one of the pioneers of computer science, and a well-deserved Turing winner for his many contributions, notabl…
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Playstation 3 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor
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Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
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Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
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The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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Why do old statues have such small penises?
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
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A look at my BBS Software from '93
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
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How the Devteam Conquered the iPhone
The summer of 2007 was an eventful one if you were into cell phones. It all started on June 29 when Apple announced the release of the iPhone. If you have never taken the time to watch the full keynote, I highly recommend it.
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Weirdos in the depression
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
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Minuteman missile communications
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could…
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Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.