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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 178 posts.
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Ken Thompson's Unix Password
Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.
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I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there ...
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Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore
The top-secret story of why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox+Leaflet.
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Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
In October 2019, my company SP Digital held an internal hackathon. My colleague Subhransu and I worked on a whacky idea of writing a brand-new Windows 3.1 app which was an OS released almost 30 years ago. The idea we chose was a Slack client. After all, Slack clients exist for most platforms but I’m certain one does…
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
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NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
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Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
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Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
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Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
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Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
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The 3dfx Voodoo1
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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Live coding a vi for CP/M from scratch
The other day, being unable to find a suitable open-source text editor for cpmish , I sat down and wrote a simple vi-like editor. It took nine hours. I have it all on video.
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A book from Alan Turing and a mysterious piece of paper
Sleuthing into the history of a 1930 book on quantum mechanics previously owned by Alan Turing and a lambda calculus note tucked inside.
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Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
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Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
This post recaps some of the C64 coding tricks used in my little Commodore 64 coding competition . The competition rules were simple: make a C64 executable (PRG) that draws two lines to form the below image. The objective was to do this in as few bytes as possible.
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The Embroidered Computer
The Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.
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Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…