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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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"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
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The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress (2015)
Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
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Early Chinese World Maps (2010)
I recently came across this fascinating world map while researching the history of the Jesuit missions in seventeenth century China . Appar...
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Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
Implementing an 8080 emulator in a microservice architecture on top of kubernetes
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Coaxial Goes to War
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
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Doom on ZPU
The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM wa...
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The Tragic Death of Practically Everything
Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flak for the magazine's current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I'm not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank he
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food product…
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Stone: Leonardo da Vinci's Resume
“An informed patriotism is what we want. Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? She is a shining city upon a hill.” - Ronald Reagan ~Largest Substack on the Right~. Click to read American Ambition, a Substack publication with…
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The Rise of Steel – Part I
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel.
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A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404 (2012)
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997)
S o Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple's own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.
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VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
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CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the iPod Team (2016)
The Apple event tomorrow morning (US Pacific time), takes place at Town Hall, Building 4, Apple, Inc. in Cupertino. It has been almost 15 years since I visited there the last time. 'Hint: It&...
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The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC
SOLVED: The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC. For a hair over twenty years, I have been chasing the markings on the ...
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The President and the Bomb, Part IV
Why the problem of "the President and the bomb" isn't about the "crazy President," but something far more pernicious and possible.
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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer
You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal g…
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Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper computer:…
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Outdoor Sound Propagation in the U.S. Civil War (1999)
Students of military history know that acoustic refraction and unusual audibility have often played significant roles in the outcome of battles. Before electrical and wireless communications became common on the tactical level, the sound of battle was often the quickest and most efficient method by which a commander…
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Residential Networking over Telephone
Recently, I covered some of the history of Ethernet's tenuous relationship with installed telephone cabling . That article focused on the earlier and more business-oriented products, but many of you probably know that there have been a number of efforts to install IP networking over installed telephone wiring in a…
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…