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Let's all meet up in the Y2K
Back in 2024 I posted a few of these on Twitter (thread reader) after digging out old photos from the dot-com boom. I was working in London at a digital agen...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 326 posts.
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The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
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Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
On the March 10, 2025 episode of Do You Speak Tech?, I sat down with two names woven into the early fabric of modern computing: Larry Masinter and Frank
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Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. In th…
275
Cash issuing terminals
In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity that you just don't get from Visa. It's funny to…
276
Ju Ci: The Art of Repairing Porcelain
Ju ci (锔瓷), the Chinese craft of repairing broken porcelain has roots dating back to the Song dynasty (960-1279), with illustrations of craftsmen mending pots appearing in Chinese paintings as earl…
277
Reverse Engineering the Prom for the SGI O2
mattst88's blog - Reverse Engineering the PROM for the SGI O2
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Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I learned upgrading this machine…
279
Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
The Akihabara institution that every Japanese maker knows — run on cash, instinct, and one founder’s restless curiosity
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Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)
How tracing words can illuminate history
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Vacuum-Form Signage
Branding Main Street America and a rabbit hole into the history behind the vacuum-formed signage found in our daily lives
282
A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator
About a eight weeks ago I had virtually no interest in calculators. Blank, dull, tedious-looking objects that remind me of long, arduous rainy afternoons in 1980’s/1990’s school maths classes.
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The case for MUDs in modern times (2018)
In the age of smart devices and instant entertainment, can a medium as old as MUDs survive? Driven entirely by text, these Multi-User Dimensions ― or Dungeons,
285
Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
The Pascal language was named after Blaise Pascal (see picture), a French mathematician who was a pioneer in computer development history. In 1641, at the age of eighteen, Pascal constructed the first arithmetical machine, arguably the first computer. He would improve upon the instrument eight years later. In 1650…
286
Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)
I was inspired by Tom Scott’s excellent video and links here where he talks about a particular type of “Inogon” light used to guide ships through channels or harbours. The patent …
287
VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next
We've passed a big milestone for our digital archive. Let's talk about where our magazine collection is going next...
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Egyptian Fractions (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
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Sony Data Discman
Let's look at this little gizmo Sony produced in the early 1990s.
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Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 1: The PC side
A blog about software craft and quality
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DOS Memory Management
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention.
294
I built a pint-sized Macintosh
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
295
Dutch computer museums (2022)
Photos from three very different computer museums in the Netherlands
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"Inspector Dangerfuck", ANSI art comic from 1994
In 1994, a teenager wanted to be noticed in the ANSI art scene. So he created "Inspector Dangerfuck": a profane, stoned, gray-skinned cartoon detective.
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Exploring PDP-1 Lisp (1960)
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
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Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
Repairing a dead power supply and replacing the NVRAM in a vintage UNIX workstation.
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