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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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.
I buy my toothpaste from overseas through eBay. Wonder why?
This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer review, a...
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.
Compaq’s descent from a company of action to a brand is a frightening parable for the the West’s focus on talk over action.
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…
This is a short story about what happened to the U.S.
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
My personal website.
I was a historian before I was an activist, and I’ve been reminded recently that a lot of younger hackers have a simplified and somewhat mythologized view of how our culture evolved, one which tends to back-project today’s conditions onto the past.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"
By now regular readers of this blog are quite familiar with my affection for the 1996 Apple Network Server , Apple's Unix-through-and-thro...
(Adapted from a Quora answer .) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 mode.…
The first mass market optical media
WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…
He was also involved in taking the Pier 1 chain nationwide
The urge to replace the mainframe has reinvented the mainframe and its problems.
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
In 1999, America Online's volunteer chat room monitors sued the company for back wages. Do today's hot Internet companies risk the same fate?
Most MiniDisc aficionados are aware of unit hacking to gain access to new features. The unit that perhaps benefits the most from this is the Sony MZ-N510, which also comes in the N520 and NF610 variants. The 2001 model R700 can be hacked to add many features of its upscale brother, the R900 , as well as the Type-R…
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...
Published: 09-04-2023 23:59 | Last update: 11-04-2023 22:29 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
Over the last few weeks, I created a computer game set in the Arctic. Or maybe I’ve been working on it since 1981. It all depends on how you count.
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...
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.
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…
