2821
RIP WC
So farewell then, Havant station’s 1930s railway toilets. It is doubtful whether many passengers will mourn their loss, but they are another piece of railway heritage that has slipped beyond …
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2822
The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
2823
The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
2824
2825
NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
2826
A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
2827
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My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time
2829
Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
2830
"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
2831
King George and Tsar Nicolas Looked a Lot Alike
haha, everyone says we look alike but i dont see it
2832
Lessons from the Long Depression
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
2833
The Albuquerque "Broken Arrow" Nuclear Accident
In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, on display at the Nationa…
2834
Fun things to do with your VM/370 CE machine – Fun with big computers
Fun things to do with big computers
2835
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it”
accept that fact if you can—1820: Irish English and associated with the obsolete figurative sense ‘to consider’ of the verb ‘smoke’
2836
I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to Draw (With 9front)
the computer lied
2837
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
2838
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
2839
Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
2840
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and l…
2841
Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
2842
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2845
A very long way from home: early Byzantine finds at the far ends of the world
The following brief post is once again offered largely for the sake of interest, being concerned with the furthest limits of the distributio...
2846
Tanaka Hisashige, builder of the Myriad Year Clock (2016)
Japan's greatest inventor whose life span a formative period in the nation's history, Tanaka Hisashige built the Myriad Year Clock, a 1000-part masterpiece that's today a national treasure.
2847
Running BBS Door Games on Windows 10 with GameSrv and DOSBox
I continue to enjoy seeing what can be done with WSL (Windows Subsystem for ...
2848
Xbox Hacks: The A20 (2021)
In the early 2000s the Xbox was released. We are nearing the 20 year anniversary so its time to dive into the A20 "hack".
2849
2850
David Kahn has died
David Kahn has died. His groundbreaking book, The Codebreakers, was the first serious book I read about codebreaking, and one of the primary reasons I entered this field. He will be missed. EDITED TO ADD (2/4): Funeral website. EDITED TO ADD (2/10): New York Times obituary.