1
Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 304 posts.
2
A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
3
A forged Apple employee badge
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
4
Open Sourcing DOS 4
See the canonical version of this blog post at the Microsoft Open Source Blog! ...
5
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
6
Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
7
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
8
Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
9
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
10
Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
11
The UX of Lego Interface Panels (2020)
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
12
The Origins of DS_store (2006)
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
13
Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors".
14
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine.
15
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III . The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460…
16
Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
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Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene
Boris Vallejo is an epic fantasy painter, who has had an immense influence on fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and even the demoscene. Throughout the decades, his works have often been replicated by pixel artists, leading to controversy. I rediscovered Vallejo's great work for myself, looked into the…
18
How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
I didn’t know what to expect from this 1937 video explanation of how wire photos were transmitted to newspapers, but a double stunt sequence featuring an airpla
19
Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I ...
20
Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
21
The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
22
How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
23
Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going
So I’m two months into trying to teach a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem to a computer. We already have one interesting story, which I felt was worth sharing.
24
Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
25
John Lasseter drew the BSD daemon logo
In my teens and early 20s I was obsessed with the history of computing and the internet. I still am, but other obsessions have reduced the relative weight of...
26
I found a 55 year old bug in the first Lunar Lander game
Update: This kinda blew up! Featured in Hacker News, Ars Technica and PC Gamer, among others. Just months after Neil Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, Jim Storer, a Lexington High School student…
27
COBOL has been “dead” for so long, my grandpa wrote about it
Delving the depths of computing, hoping not to get eaten by wumpus
28
There’s a 30-year old dead Rabbit in Seven Sisters tube station
For over thirty years, a dead rabbit has hung inside Seven Sisters tube station, and thousands of people walk past it every day without noticing.
29
Let's stop counting centuries
One-indexing problems in everyday life
30
The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor