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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2792
Advent of Code on the Z-Machine
Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…
2793
Building a Galaksija
Note: this is the first part of three articles about my experience building a 1980s Yugoslav 8-bit computer called the Galaksija. This part is mostly focused on the technical aspects of building this…
2794
The JSMESS Sound Emergency
UPDATE: I’m happy to say a developer has come forward and we’re out of the woods on sound. It’s not perfect, but the web audio API isn’t perfect and we’re much better …
2795
A bizarre Commodore 64 peripheral, a mime, and some pretty bad ads
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
2796
Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
2797
History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
2798
Gox.com Domain Name Acquired by Mt. Gox Parent Company
It appears that Tibanne Co. Ltd. the company that operates the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange has acquired the Gox.com domain name from Andy Booth.
2799
“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)
"THAT DEEP ROMANTIC CHASM": LIBERTARIANISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE COMPUTER CULTURE
2800
First photo of HS2 tunnel boring machines
HS2 has released the first picture of one the two TBMs that will spend around three years digging the longest and deepest HS2 tunnels – from just inside the M25 to South Heath in Buckinghamshire.
2801
It’s 1997 and you want to build a website
You have a few options. How much time you got?
2802
Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
2803
The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your […]
2804
The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
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Vision 1993
I’ve plowed through the first wave of AVP (Apple Vision Pro) reviews, and it seems pretty obvious that, at the current price and form factor, it’s not gonna be a best-seller. But I remain a strong believer in Augmented Reality (the AVP is VR not AR, for the moment). As I was diving into the reviews, a little voice in…
2807
Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
A dive into Seoul Metro's Line 9
2808
The Birkana hexadecimal number symbols
AMONG number systems, the hexadecimal system of counting (or 'radix') has a special place in the hearts of programmers, being closely relate...
2809
Defending against hypothetical moon life during Apollo 11
This is how a completely abstract argument about alien germs was taken seriously and mitigated at great effort and expense during the 1969 Apollo landing.
2810
One-bit Computing at 60 Hertz
an extremely simple processor design
2811
Programming with DOS Debugger (2003)
MS-DOS as well as Windows 98 come with a debugger program named DEBUG.EXE that can be used to work with assembly language instructions and machine code. In MS-DOS version 6.22, this program is named DEBUG.EXE and it is typically present at C:\DOS\DEBUG.EXE . On Windows 98, this program is usually present at…
2812
Connecting a Macintosh SE to the Internet with a Raspberry Pi
How to connect a 68k Mac to the internet without an ethernet card!
2813
Building a vacuum tube computer
Having 32 (31) registers, this means that a refresh will be issued each 256us. To be on the safe side, the capacitor should keep its charge much longer than that. Testing with both EAA91 (ideal diode) and some semiconductors: Diode charge hold time Comment EAA91 >500us ideal diode 1N4148 >500us for reference, leakage…
2814
Booting the IBM 1401: How a 1959 punch-card computer loads a program
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...
2815
Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
2816
Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
But there’s only one slot, you say? It’s all a matter of using a clever part to adapt a pass-through.
2817
Getting a Psion 5 palmtop from 1997 online via PPP (and a Raspberry Pi)
Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea - I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet...
2818
MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
2819
Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVb: Work Hardening, or Hardly Working?
This week, we close out our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, although I ought to note that there will be at least one addendum di…
2820
The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
Serial Number of First Unix System In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC fo...