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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…
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Arch Linux turned 20 years old today. It was released on 11/March/2002
About Arch Linux is an i686-optimized linux distribution based on ideas from CRUX , a great distribution developed by Per Lidén. It is lightweight and contains the latest stable versions of software. Packages are in .tar.gz format and are tracked by a package manager that is designed to allow easy package upgrades…
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What ever happened to webrings? (2015)
Before search engines were what they are today, webrings were a great way to find websites that interested you. So what happened to them?
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The history of sending signals to Unix process groups
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Ultra High Resolution Photo of Night Watch (2022)
Op 8 juli 2019 start het Rijksmuseum Operatie Nachtwacht, het grootste en meest veelzijdige onderzoeks- en restauratieproject van Rembrandts meesterwerk in de geschiedenis. Operatie Nachtwacht heeft tot doel het schilderij optimaal te behouden voor de toekomst.
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Zero point leet seconds (2018)
While calculating certain round-trip times, here is a number I came across that is surprisingly memorable: It takes light 0.1337 seconds to travel the length of the Earth's equator via vacuum or air. Let me repeat that. It takes light "zero point leet" seconds to travel once around the equator.
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The Story of Heroku
Heroku made it easy for any developer to build and run applications in the cloud without managing their own infrastructure. Now, 15 years later, it continues to inspire the next generation of developers.
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DOS/4GW and Protected Mode (2021)
MS-DOS game programmers had to deal with several limitations. This article goes over some of these obstacles and explores how we used the DOS/4GW extender & protected mode to unleash the power of 32-bit DOS.
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A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
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The mainframe in your pocket running minicomputer software
Running Minicomputer Software
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Elena Ceausescu: Greatest Scientist Ever – except she was a fraud
If you think that people who deliberately engage in dubious scientific practices like plagiarism, falsification of results, or attendance at fake conferences represent the worst of scientific misconduct—then you have clearly never heard of Elena Ceausescu.
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A CIA website was out of date about who runs the UK
A guest post from Tony Bowden about his efforts to build an open source dataset of world leaders inside of Wikidata, the structured-data version of Wikipedia.
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The Changes for the 2nd Edition of “Code”
Whenever a 2nd edition of a book is published, people ask “I already have the 1st edition. Do I need to get the 2nd?” It’s a legitimate question and I’ve asked it myself. Reading a 2nd edition after the 1st is not trivial: It’s a commitment of both additional money and additional time.
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Listerine Royalties
With an iron-clad court ruling, Listerine royalties represent a uniquely enduring cash-flowing asset.
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Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars
The games of Revolution Software bore the stamp of the places in which they were conceived. Work on Beneath a Steel Sky , the company’s breakthrough graphic adventure, began in Hull, a grim postindustrial town in the north of England, and those environs were reflected in the finished product’s labyrinths of polluted…
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Missing Darwin Notebooks Returned to Cambridge University Library
Charles Darwin’s iconic Tree of Life notebooks anonymously left in a pink gift bag, 15 months after launch of a worldwide appeal to find them
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Not as famous as they should be (2021)
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma are often deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work…
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004)
So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.
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Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
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Intel 286 secrets: ICE mode and F1 0F 04
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
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A seamstress who solved the ancient mystery of the Argonaut
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
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What happened to Tandy computers
Tandy took a chance in 1984 and it paid off, then they played it safe too long
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The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
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If the news is fake, imagine history
Access to the Network has changed our perception of the present and the perception of the past.
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