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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
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Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
Wherein the author discusses the Plan 9 operating system. First of several.
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Ultima Underworld bugs
As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own…
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1971 Social Engineering Attack
From Betty Medsger’s book on the 1971 FBI burglary (page 22): As burglars, they used some unusual techniques, ones Davidon enjoyed recalling years later, such as what some of them did in 1970 at a draft board office in Delaware. During their casing, they had noticed that the interior door that opened to the draft…
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Windows 3.x VDDVGA
While working on my Windows 3.x display driver , I ran into a vexing problem. In Windows 3.1 running in Enhanced 386 mode, I could start a DOS session and switch it to a window. But an attempt to set a mode in the DOS window (e.g. MODE CO80 ) would destroy the Windows desktop, preventing further drawing from happening…
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A Philosopher Every Programmer Should Know: Susanne K. Langer
Get your very own domain easily. Fast and professional customer service.
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Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
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Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
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The Road to MS-DOS 2.0
One little step toward UNIX
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Mille Bornes
Edmond Dujardin, Joseph Callenac and the design history of Mille Bornes.
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Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)
An MIT urban planner looks at the alternative vision for a Berlin that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built.
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Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…
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Lucasart's Afterlife
I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…
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VisiCalc on the Apple II
In 1978, Bricklin and Frankston took out a loan to develop "Calcu-ledger," a tool that could project the fiscal health of taking out that very loan
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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
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Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025
setting up 20 year old hardware is bound to work first try, right? ... right?
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The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Structured Text on the Internet before the World Wide Web
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The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
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How to Build a Pyramid
Exactly how did the Egyptians build the Pyramid of Khufu and its two great successors on the Giza Plateau? That question has been debated at least since the time of Herodotus. Many a person has looked upon what the Egyptians are alleged to have wrought, compared it with the early date which historians assign to it…
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A Macintosh History 85.10
The creation of the original Macintosh has been extensively studied and written about, but what happened after it launched? What was it like to own a Macintosh in the mid-eighties? I intend to tell this story of the Macintosh through the pages of MacUser.
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Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
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Compiling the Original Commodore 64 KERNAL Source
Many reverse-engineered versions of “KERNAL”, the C64’s ROM operating system exist, and some of them even in a form that can be built into the original binary. But how about building the original C64 KERNAL source with the original tools?
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FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
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The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…