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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 139 posts.
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. A very odd essay from a 1922 issue of The American Magazine that seems to go against the general grain of most of the articles…
On January 19th of this year, I set off to California to participate in a hastily-arranged appearance in a UCLA building to talk about saving climate data in the face of possible administrative swi…
A map of the roads of ancient Rome, in the style of a transit diagram.
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
If you read the news , you may think the MP3 file format was recently officially “killed” somehow, and any remaining MP3 holdouts should all move to AAC now. These are all simple rewrites of Fraunhofer IIS’ announcement that they’re terminating the MP3 patent-licensing program.
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
*tl;dr: I built a Wi-Fi enabled LEGO Macintosh Classic running Docker on a Raspberry Pi Zero with an e‑paper display. Docker deployments via resin.io. photos
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...
It says much about Sid Meier, a born game designer if ever there was one, that he tended to get some of his best work done when he was allegedly on vacation. A few years after his significant other had lost all track of him on what she thought was a romantic getaway to the Caribbean but he came to see as the ideal…
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the…
I grew up in the 80's, the decade home computers went from curiosity to mainstream. In primary school we had several Philips P2000T home com...
If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
