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Ancient Egyptian Stone-Drilling (1983)
<p>More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked […]</p>
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
272
Elizabeth line testing ways of banishing its "ghosts in the walls"
The appearance of shadowy ghosts has plagued some of the Elizabeth line's central London stations, and now TfL is trying to banish them.
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Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)
Not much is known about Benjamin Thorpe (1782-1870), yet he was one of the first scholars to publish voluminous editions and translations of Old English texts. This blog provides an overview of Tho…
274
A deep history of Halloween
Or, how far back can historical analysis take us?
275
Refurb Weekend: Canon Cat
It's the Memorial Day holiday weekend and it's time for a little deferred maintenance, especially on those machines I intend to work on more...
276
Multispectral Imaging and the Voynich Manuscript
(with thanks to René Zandbergen, Ray Clemens, Roger Easton, Claire Bowern, Bill Endres, and the curatorial and conservation staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library) I have some exc…
277
A floppy disk MIDI boombox: The Yamaha MDP-10
Longtime readers of Nicole Express might know that I dabble in playing the organ. But sometimes I want to play with sounds that don’t have the organ’s defini...
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Inside an IBM/Motorola mainframe controller chip from 1981
In this article, I look inside a chip in the IBM 3274 Control Unit. 1 But before I discuss the chip, I need to give some background on main...
280
Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
281
CRT Manufacturing
Explore CRT lamp history at vintageTEK. View TekTalk and TekWeek articles, photos, and PDFs documenting CRT lamp and gun assembly production.
282
The Future That Never Was
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
283
The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
284
We'll buy back your Typewriter for Uncle Sam
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
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EURISKO Lives
Programming blog of Eugene
286
Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
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The LaserDisc
The first mass market optical media
288
Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
289
PC Floppy Copy Protection: Softguard Superlok
This is part 2 of a series on PC floppy copy protection methods. You can read Part 1, covering Formaster Copy-Lock here . Softguard System...
290
2024's public domain is a banger
They stole something from you. For decades, they stole it. That thing they stole? Your entire culture. For all of human history, works created in living memory entered the public domain every year. 40 years ago, that stopped.
291
New York Times Flash-based visualizations work again
In the 2000s, if you wanted to make interactive or animated visualization for the web, Flash was the main option. When Flash lost support and fell off the internet, a solid decade of great visualiz…
292
Japanese words and names sound African (2022)
A blog by Professor Farooq Kperogi about Nigeria, America, politics, education, culture, identity, media, language, English grammar, and much more.
293
The Reign of Alexander III of Macedon
This week, in part as a follow-on to our series on the contest between Hellenistic armies and Roman legions, I wanted to take the opportunity to talk about Alexander III, who you almost certainly k…
294
Prayer, Placement, and Absolution: Peter Hristoff on Islamic Prayer Rugs (2015)
Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff meditates on the role of Islamic prayer rugs (seccades) and the role they play in his own creative output.
295
Japanese Handsaws: The Maebiki Ooga
A famous blockprint by Hokusai titled “Mount Fuji Seen from the Mountains of Totomi,” showing a crew of sawyers rip-sawing a timber into boards using maebiki ooga saws, one man on top a…
296
Unix version control lore: what, ident
There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident . They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and…
297
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Cassette Vision
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
298
Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
299
Soviet Calculator History (1998)
The first mechanical device used in Russia for computational purposes was the Russian abacus ( schoty ). This device became "the national calculator" and was used in cashier's offices down to the middle of the 90's. It is interesting to note that the textbook "Trade calculations" published in 1986 devotes a whole…
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Fifty years of the personal computer operating system
Fifty years ago, PC software pioneer Gary Kildall demonstrated CP/M, the first commercially successful personal computer operating system.