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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
272
A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...
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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.
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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 …
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How Markdown took over the world
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
277
Is the Living Computer Museum dead?
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
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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...
279
Thank You for 20 Years of Discogs
Discogs Digs is the place to start your journey of music discovery. Explore recommendations, unique stories, guides, and more.
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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
How a specification surfaced a defect in the Apollo flight code.
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Masahiro Kikuno, Japanese Independent Watchmaker
A Japanese approach to watchmaking, executed by hand.
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
100% cotton paper. 100% crazy.
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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
286
Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
287
Simulating the PIN cracking scene in Terminator 2
In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card.
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StarCraft: Orcs in space go down in flames
StarCraft was once mocked as 'Orcs in space' and heading for disaster. This is the story of the reboot that saved it.
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Over 700k paintings from the Rijksmuseum online copyright free
Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum has put over 700,000 digitised copies of its huge art collection online, and is making them available to reuse as public domain
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Things Unexpectedly Named After People
Unfortunately, Rocket Lab does not seem to be named after seed investor/aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket .
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The 100 MHz 6502
A 6502 (or 65C02) in an FPGA, running at 100 MHz, ready to plug into your vintage computer
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How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
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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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Round Rects Are Everywhere
Bill Atkinson worked mostly at home, but whenever he made significant progress he rushed in to Apple to show it off to anyone who would appreciate it. This time, he visited the Macintosh offices at Texaco Towers to show off his brand new oval routines, which were implemented using a really clever algorithm.
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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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Understanding the War in Ukraine
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
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More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Internet Archive
Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we've added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago…
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Twenty-five years of curl
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…