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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 422 posts.
BASIC is often dismissed as an inferior language compared to its successors. Common complaints are its use of line numbers, its heavy reliance on GOTO for execution flow, and its lack of a stack for local variables. What many critics overlook is that at the time of its use (during the first wave of home computers)…
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
Question: At what point during the history of science did we discover outer space was a vacuum? I’m pretty sure it was before we actually went there, but when did we know for certain? — MC, Algoma, WI
This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Sci…
For 40 years, Costco has succeeded with a simple formula: reinvest merchandising profits into lower prices and better products; be a disciplined operator; and treat customers and employees well. But with greater share of shopping moving online, it’s fair to wonder if the company's best da
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
In 2001, digital cameras were a rare commodity. They were expensive, bulky and captured images that were inferior to the organic look of…
Rich description of aspects of academic life from student through professor at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1900-01.
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
Software abstraction ladder becomes too tall and starts to fall
And it was so avoidable! The bug was from a piece of dead code, left over from the previous Ariane 4 mission a decade before.
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
Last Modified Sunday, 05-Aug-2018 12:53:53 EDT These pages were made by Justin R. Erenkrantz unless otherwise stated. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License . These pages will look best in an XHTML 1.0 compliant browser.
“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many…
Plus! A Sonos v. Google surprise, a 101 case rejects cert, and Celgene's REVLIMID
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
Early in his career, Kevin Mitnick successfully hacked California law. He told me the story when he heard about my new book, which he partially recounts his 2012 book, Ghost in the Wires. The setup is that he just discovered that there’s warrant for his arrest by the California Youth Authority, and he’s trying to…
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
This map story is about one specific map, the only one remaining from the Roman …
Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…
How much do you know about how the PSTN (that is, the public telephone network) works? At some point long long ago, it was signalled using in-band frequencies, which facilitated the infamous phreaking using so-called “blue boxes”. This led to a switch to out of band signalling, ultimately culminating in something…
And then punished the Jew who objected to that action.
👶 From when Mosaic took over Gopher. 🏢 VP of Engineering @ Cloudflare 🕹️ Slightly addicted to retrocomputing 🔍 Hit Ctrl-K to Search
I've been contacted a few times recently about the sharp decline in descriptive images on the events listings.
In the distant nethermists of time, documents once briefly ruled the earth (or at least Mac OS), and to that end I managed to find a verrr...
