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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Retrospective on Project Xanadu’s success and failure: a lack of design iteration, meaningful use-cases, or practicality stopped a valuable vision from maturing into something useful. (And contrasted with my approach.)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
In 2006, CHM curators traveled to Germany to follow a lead on an abandoned collection of historical computing artifacts. In a three-story warehouse, they found a real-world timeline of computing history. After days of exploring and assessing, they brought back nearly 2,000 items for the permanent collection.
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…
Running Minicomputer Software
News, research, and insights from Stanford University.
In Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), the Inuit people are known for carving portable maps out of driftwood to be used while navigating coastal waters. These pieces, which are small enough to be carried…
G64 files are C64/1541 disk images that contain all bits as they are physically laid out on the 5¼-inch floppy disk. Let’s visualize them! This animation shows 28 regular Commodore 1541 disks. Track 1 contains 21 sectors. Every sector is prefixed by two small red areas: These are the SYNC marks.…
I heard this morning about the death yesterday of Philip Anderson, at the age of 96. It’s not hard to make the case that Anderson was the most important condensed matter theorist of the twent…
Shocking new research confirms the ancient Carthaginians ritually sacrificed children as offerings to the gods, overturning decades of denial. Uncover the dark secrets of this long-forgotten civilisation.
Visit our Ripley’s Believe It or Not! aquariums and attractions, today. Immerse yourself in a world of wonder and create memories with your friends and family.
Reading time: 15 minutes There are many significant differences between Latin and its linguistic descendants, the Romance languages. One that stands out from the rest is grammatical gender. Latin h…
After building the infrastructure to analyse the code in an Ubuntu release I decided to satisfy a simple curiosity and figure out how much GNU software is actually part of a modern distribution. I picked Ubuntu natty (released in April) as a reference, am counting lines of code (LOC) as the rough metric for size of a…
At long last, Relic Entertainment has announced that Age of Empires 4 is coming. Strategy gamers rejoice! I am excited – I played the first one back in ’98 (I may be dating myself here)…
On 9 July 1925, in a letter to Wolfgang Pauli, Werner Heisenberg revealed his new ideas, which were to revolutionise physics
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
The Nobel Peace Prize 2019 was awarded to Abiy Ahmed Ali "for his efforts to achieve peace and international cooperation, and in particular for his decisive initiative to resolve the border conflict with neighbouring Eritrea"
If you think that people who deliberately engage in dubious scientific practices like plagiarism, falsification of results, or attendance at fake conferences represent the worst of scientific misconduct—then you have clearly never heard of Elena Ceausescu.
Who were the Romans? How did they understand themselves as a people and ‘Roman’ as an identity? And what were the implications of that understanding – and perhaps more importantly…
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
