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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
When I was young I owned a PlayStation 1 (PS1). It was one of the first, if not the first, game consoles I owned and it had a profound effect on my future. I can trace the history of how I got involved in computers back to playing and modding
A quick look at how the movie The Exorcist from 1973 has links to the late great Alan Turing via Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells, Scotland and Amateur Radio. It’s Halloween so figured why not throw some horror in the mix.
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
The PowerBook 1400 is, and remains, my favourite laptop. It was everything the PowerBook 5300 should have been and more. It was my first l...
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on Hackaday . Gosh. This in itself has provoked some discussion. Its also resulted in a lot of people telling me that NO COMMODORE WAS…
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
I have a Tektronix TDS 684B oscilloscope that I bought cheaply at an auction. It has 4 channels, 1 GHz of BW and a sample rate of 5 Gsps. Those are respectable numbers even by today’s standards. It’s also the main reason why I have it: compared to modern oscilloscopes, the other features aren’t nearly as impressive…
Lessons from Atlantropa, the megaproject to unite Europe (& erase Africa)
Wow! This takes me back! Please check the date this post was authored, as it may no longer be relevant in a modern context.
This is the third of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries. Last time we discussed Rome&…
2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…
Some integrated circuits have very interesting dies under a microscope, like the chip below with designs that look kind of like butterflies....
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
Visi On was the first full GUI for the IBM PC. First demonstrated by VisiCorp at Fall Comdex 1982 and released at the end of 1983, just prior to the Apple Macintosh, it pre-dated the release of Microsoft Windows by several years.
Homemade clone of the Dick Smith Wizzard/VTech CreatiVision game console.
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
The remains of four iron furnaces, operated by the Lackawanna Iron Works, are located in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its disp...
Once upon a time, microcomputers were simple and easy to understand. So simple in fact that a kid like me, with no computer experience whatsoever, could actually understand them, build them, program them, and put them to work in his very own projects!
Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.
