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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
In August 2020 we were commissioned to recover a cache of locked QText documents from the mid-90s. This is the process of analyzing the encrypted documents and reverse engineering a DOS-era Hebrew-English word processor written in Turbo Pascal.
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
A history of blue 🦋
Did you know there were typewriters that used ball point pens to draw not just text but also graphics? I’ve collected several of these over the years. Read on to discover a world that you didn’t know existed.
One scientist did it twice
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A few weeks back I got a note on Bluesky, linking me to a website offering a free computer. The owner was in Cambridge, not far from me, and the computer was an HP 9000/300 Series - a Model 340, specifically.
Windows 98 runs surprisingly well in QEMU via UTM SE, but it requires some care in setting it up. It’s a great way to run old 90s Windows and DOS software on your iPad (and Mac too, though you have… Continue reading →
If you type “WAIT6502,1″ into a Commodore PET with BASIC V2 (1979), it will show the string “MICROSOFT!” at the top left corner of the screen. Legend has it Bill Gates himself inserted this easter egg “after he had had an argument with Commodore founder Jack Tramiel”, “just in case Commodore ever…
Researchers at Nordita at Stockholm University have analyzed flashes of light on astronomical plates from the early 1950s and found statistical connections between the times of these flashes, nuclear weapons tests and reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP). The results are presented in two studies published…
Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO , it started to become obvious to everyone who worked for him that the torch he carried for computer games no longer…
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
Among the most impressive manufacturing achievements of the US during WWII was the number of ships it produced.
The United States was born of a desire to leave behind monarchial government and instead live under a republic. Although the structure of the United States was explicitly crafted to have both …
Everything put into the building that is unnecessary, every cubic foot that is used for purely ornamental purposes beyond that needed to express its use and to make it harmonize with others of its class, is a waste — is, to put it in plain English, perverting someone’s money — George Hill, commercial real estate…
On 9 July 1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics
From the seventies to nineties, cars that roamed Singapore roads were largely imported from countries such as Australia (Holden), Czechoslovakia (Skoda), France (Citroen, Peugeot, Renault), Germany…
This footage has gone viral online with the claim that it shows an 3 year old chimney sweep on the job: Millions of people saw the footage, shared it online an were upset by it, as they should be&#…
Typography for Lawyers
Explore Tektronix equipment in films and TV at vintageTEK. Find detailed screenshots and IDs of scopes, probes, and monitors from 1953–1984.
Rockwell famously used 6502-based cores in modems for many years, but that doesn't mean other 6502s couldn't be used. If only there were a w...
Long-time readers will know that my first video game love was the text-mode video game slash creation studio ZZT. One feature of this game is the ability to ...
January 1, 2026 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1930 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1925! By Jennifer Jenkins and James Boyle[1]CC BY 4.0Please note that this site is only about US law; the copyright terms in other countries are different.[2] On January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930…
Last year, I discovered that the Kosinski compression format is actually LZEXE, which was used for compressing DOS executables back in the 90s and the late 80s. Its developer catalogues three versi…
For this project I designed and built a meshtastic radio that plugs directly into the Commodore 64. My goal was to release this at the VCF M...
Cantor conceived set theory in a sequence of six papers published in the Mathematische Annalen during the five year period 1879–1884. In the fifth of these papers, published in 1883, 1 he stated as a law of thought ( Denkgesetz ) that every set can be well-ordered or, more precisely, that it is always possible to…
Reportedly Microsoft's first hardware product.
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever." Lynx br...
A 1987 technical introduction to OS/2, covering its architecture, multitasking capabilities, API, and kernel system services.
Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.
