2911
Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor
The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hund...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
2912
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
2913
Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum
Down a rather shabby road in a Cambridge industrial estate can be found a haven of retro computing delights - the Centre for Computing History.
2914
Historical Map of the Cognitive Sciences: An Attempt
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
2915
Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC (2019)
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
2916
Rethinking the Commodore 64 Memory Map (2018)
I've had my head down, programming away on C64 OS, and been making some great progress. I've tweeted a few things out, some of which are revealing of things I've either never talked about here or even seem to contradict what I've said here. So I'd like to take a breather and talk about some of these developments.
2917
Upside Down Air Force
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
2918
Six Characters
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
2919
What Alan T. did for his PhD
We’ve all been there before: by the time you start graduate school in Princeton, you’ve already invented the Turing machine, pioneered the concept of computational universality, and pro…
2920
Modern 6502
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
2921
The paddle wheel aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan
You’ve read the title. Aircraft carriers of where powered by what? I was just as surprised as you are, but yes, they really did exist. I now introduce you to USS Wolverine and USS Sable:
2922
Sanyo Triple Five
Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me. Like, for instance, buying a broken super-budget PC-incompatible from 1982.
2923
A Test Suite for the Intel 8088
In a previous article, I revealed one of the secrets to MartyPC 's accuracy, hardware validation . To summarize, it is a method of using a m...
2924
Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, b…
2925
The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
2926
19th Century Marriage Manuals: Advice for Young Husbands
Published in 1837, The Young Husband’s Book is described as a “manual of domestic duties.”
2927
Seeing Through the Spartan Mirage
Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?
2928
The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers
If you want to watch the video first, it is below
2929
Multiplying and dividing with Hindu-Arabic numerals and with Roman ones
Last Sunday the eminent British historian of the twentieth century, Richard Evans, tweeted the following: Let’s remember we use Arabic numerals – 1, 2, 3 etc. Try dividing MCMLXVI by XX…
2930
The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
2931
Interview with Hansen Hsu, engineer at Apple during transition from OS 9 to OS X
The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we built. The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team…
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2934
The Rest of the Lenna Story
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
2935
Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
2936
The Potomac River Midair Collision
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
2937
The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
2938
Reverse-engineering the LM185 voltage reference chip and its bandgap reference
Many circuits, such as a computer power supply or a phone charger, require a stable voltage reference, but it's harder than you might expec...
2939
How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?
One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden ag…
2940
Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…