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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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Here be four bits of dragons: the Mattel D&D Computer Game and the TMS1100
When my parents sold the house and moved to the great white north, they dropped off a few boxes of my stuff that was still in the garage. ...
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How the Sears Catalog Undermined White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South
Sears has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to close hundreds of stores in an effort to keep the company afloat. The Sears catalog is perhaps one of the
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The 68000 Wars, Part 2: Jack Is Back
Jack Tramiel, the computer executive most likely to be compared to Darth Vader. I wonder why?
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RoboCop – Breaking the Law. H0ffman Cracks RoboCop Arcade from DataEast
It’s time to take down the future of law enforcement. Following on from my discovery that RoboCop arcade has bootleg protection, see here , I decided it would be fun to crack it. TL;DR –…
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The King doesn't own all the swans in Britain
So who does?
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One Year into the War in Ukraine
Today marks the end of the first year of Putin’s War in Ukraine. I will not call it an anniversary, because I don’t think anyone is celebrating. Nevertheless I think this makes a useful…
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The Life of MS-DOS
First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. This article details different versions and releases that all stemmed from Gary Kildall's QDOS.
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“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
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The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)
Vulcan & dBASE
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Why a Slide Rule Works
Why does lining up two scales of a slide rule let you multiply numbers?
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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announ
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USB-C done cheap: when 2 ports become 1 (2020)
How PC hardware is implementing USB-C in a way that may or may not violate standards.
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Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388
A deeper analysis of the events which caused a Kazakh airliner to go out of control over Portugal in November 2018.
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Ken and Roberta (2011)
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
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A helicopter and boats to perform a rare ceremony at the Tower of London
Next week, a fairly rare ceremony will take place in and around the Tower of London, and it's even more special than usual this time.
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AT&T's Hobbit Microprocessor (2023)
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
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Vetinari's Clock (2011)
In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.
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The Birth of Standard Error
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
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Somali Law
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Reverse-engineering an airspeed/Mach indicator from 1977
How does a vintage airspeed indicator work? CuriousMarc picked one up for a project, but it didn't have any documentation, so I reverse-en...
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM
It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…
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An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end (2011)
Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March & 9 April 2016, and 28 December 2023. The…
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Book Review: 1587, a Year of No Significance
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest