2701
Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display
This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC ...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2702
Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
2703
AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer (2015)
In 2004 I built the first AppleCrate , an 8-board system, as an inexpensive, easy to program vehicle for experiments in parallel programming�a kind of "blade server" for the Apple II, if you will! AppleCrate I (at the time I didn't realize that it was number "I" ;-) was great fun, and it enabled some very interesting…
2704
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
A blog about software craft and quality
2705
PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
2706
Wiring and Cabling: How to Lace Cable Harnesses (1962)
From OP 2230, "Workmanship and Design Practices for Electronic Equipment" , published by the direction of the chief of the Bureau of Naval Weapons , 1 December, 1962. pp. 7-9 --- 7-14.
2707
Damnit I slipped and (mostly) built an Amiga 500
EDIT - the original article has an image of the PCB with the floppy power connector mounted the WRONG WAY. This is the INCORRECT WAY. Do NO...
2708
DOS Memory Management
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention.
2709
I built a pint-sized Macintosh
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
2710
Dutch computer museums (2022)
Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands
2711
"Inspector Dangerfuck", ANSI art comic from 1994
In 1994, a teenager wanted to be noticed in the ANSI art scene. So he created "Inspector Dangerfuck": a profane, stoned, gray-skinned cartoon detective.
2712
Each New Boot a Miracle – DOSBOX in the Browser
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 sy…
2713
2714
The First App Store
Editor’s Note: This article ends on a cliffhanger. The next part goes out in a week. I will start with an honest admission. I didn’t set out to write about the world’s first app store. I set out to write about Brother printers. But doing my research,
2715
2716
50 Years of Text Games: The End of a Journey
Some final thoughts on this epic expedition.
2717
In defense of Unix
While there may be some situations in which DOS has a better command, Unix works better overall.
2718
Microsoft forced people to install their browser (2010)
It was a happy time for PC users. Microsoft had just delivered Windows 95, an incredibly vast improvement over windows 3.1 and DOS.
2719
Bits of History, Words of Advice
"Why do you jackasses use these inferior linguistic vehicles when we have something here that’s so precious, so elegant, which gives me so ...
2720
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The Taos Operating System (1991)
{This material originally appeared in the March, 1991 International Edition of Byte magazine, a McGraw-Hill publication} To describe TAOS (pronounced 'dowse' as in the oriental religion Daoism) as an innovatory operating system would be a profound understatement. It has so few points of
2722
Really Atari ST?
This blog has previously examined a very very strange code fragment in the BIOS module of DOS. To recap, when deciding whether a boot sector might have a valid BPB, DOS checks whether the first byte is a relative jump (opcode E9h) or a short jump (opcode EBh), both used by different DOS versions. But it also checks…
2723
The Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth -- that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water -- but it's a myth.
2724
35mm cinema film and digital audio
A while ago I decided to pick up some 35mm cinema film to help me experiment with projection optics.
2725
The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
2726
2727
The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
2728
Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
2729
Mac and the iPad: History Repeats Itself
For those of us around Apple for the launch of the 1984 Mac, things are awfully familiar.
2730
When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...