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Tony Hoare has died
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGO...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 244 posts.
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Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
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Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day , I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
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Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology.
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How far back in time can you understand English?
An experiment in language change
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Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
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What Sun got wrong
We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies.
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Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
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Television is 100 years old today
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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
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Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
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Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
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Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium , was a CD-ROM drive . With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed…
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The Beam Engine
See how a beam engine works through interactive 3D figures exploring steam, pressure, Watt's condenser, valves, linkages, and the governor.
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SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. Its only problem is that it doesn't run well on contemporary systems. Not to worry, here's a complete guide to a perfect game of SimCity 3000 on modern Windows:...
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A History of IDEs at Google
Laurent Le Brun's blog
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The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
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How Markdown took over the world
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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Late Bronze Age Collapse
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
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The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
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C++: The Documentary
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
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A few interesting modern pixel fonts
A blog about software craft and quality
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Emacs appearances in pop culture
Thank you for the support, this blog post got featured on the front page of Hacker News (YCombinator).
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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
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Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
Archaeologists have uncovered a royal archive of cuneiform tablets in the ancient Hittite city of Samuha, modern-day Sivas, central Turkey. This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life…
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My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
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Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
A generation of technology workers grew up using it
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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.