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Bill Atkinson has died
Link to: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10238073579963378&id=1378467145&_rdr
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 287 posts.
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From: Steve Jobs. "Great idea, thank you."
The one email I ever got from Steve Jobs, and it said …
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MacPaint Art from the Mid-80s Still Looks Great Today
40 years later and the art people painstaking made in MacPaint on their little Macs still amazes me.
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Mr TIFF
For as long as I have published my books, one of my overarching goals was to give credit to those who actually invented the hardware and software that we use. I have spent 10,000+ hours to create an accurate record of their work but I'm not complaining. The
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Surnames from nicknames nobody has any more
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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It's time to make computing personal again
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it
The systematic thinking errors that kill breakthrough technology and the decision framework that prevents these disasters
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The demoscene as a UNESCO heritage in Sweden
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
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Half-Life
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
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Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire
This week we’re looking at a specific visual motif common in TV and film: the arrow volley. You know the scene: the general readies his archers, he orders them to ‘draw!’ and then…
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How the U.S. became a science superpower
Prior to WWII the U.S was a distant second in science and engineering. By the time the war was over, U.S. science and engineering had blown past the British, and led the world for 85 years. It happ…
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Nokia N900 Necromancy
Building a fake battery, adding a USB-C port, booting from SD card, and giving a new life to a classic Linux smartphone.
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Bill Atkinson's psychedelic user interface
How an Apple legend approached the world’s most powerful psychedelic as a user-experience problem to be solved.
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Screenshots from developers: 2002 vs. 2015 (2015)
Same people, 13 years later.
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The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
Movies are handmade, and just like any other art form, sometimes the seams that hold movies together become visible to the audience. For mov...
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Obituary for Cyc
After 40 years, 30 million rules, 200 million dollars, 2000 person-years, and many promises, Cyc has failed to reach intellectual maturity, and may never will. Exacerbated by the secrecy and insularity of Cycorp, there remains no evidence of its general intelligence.
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iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerge. David Siegel advocates for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen keeps it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combines flair with usability.
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More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work
I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase , or that have copyleft designs .
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Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry
That soon-to-reenter Cosmos 482 is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details.
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
Wherein we figure out how to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun
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1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
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