Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
Robyn Miller, one half of the pair of brothers who created the adventure game known as Myst with their small studio Cyan, tells a story about its development that’s irresistible to a writer like me. When the game was nearly finished, he says, its publisher Brøderbund insisted that it be put through “focus-group…
Finalist #6 of the book review contest
An interactive, illustrated timeline of historic moments in humankind's quest for information. With annotations by Jeremy Norman.
By Jennifer Jenkins, Director of Duke’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain January 1, 2021 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1925 are open to all! On January 1, 2021, copyrighted works from 1925 will enter the US public domain,1 where they will be free for all to use and build upon. These […]
Ignore simple physics and your appendage could be amputated by a tug of war rope.
A guest post from Tony Bowden about his efforts to build an open source dataset of world leaders inside of Wikidata, the structured-data version of Wikipedia.
Yes, it's true! I'm the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)
It is with deep regret that I announce the closure of Whitechapel Bell Foundry , the world’s most famous bell foundry and Britain’s oldest manufacturing company. Below you can read my interview with Alan Hughes, the last in a line of bell founders stretching back to 1420, who will retire next year at sixty-eight years…
(First, as a public service message, if you're running Linux on a G5 you may wish to update the kernel .) I'm a big fan of NetBSD . I've ru...
How A. W. Jones improvised his way to an investment style and structure that has persisted till today.
Project Xanadu as a pattern language, rather than a failed software project
Whenever a 2nd edition of a book is published, people ask “I already have the 1st edition. Do I need to get the 2nd?” It’s a legitimate question and I’ve asked it myself. Reading a 2nd edition after the 1st is not trivial: It’s a commitment of both additional money and additional time.
Explore Tektronix equipment in films and TV at vintageTEK. Find detailed screenshots and IDs of scopes, probes, and monitors from 1953–1984.
There was a cultural divide in benshi preferences, rather like the difference in taste between those
Denison “Denny” Bollay is one of the guys at ExperTelligence that crafted the first Interface Builder (IB) and showed Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Jeff Wishnie introduced me (thanks dude) recently, and I’ve been talking to Denny as I have an agenda - Pseudo-declarative UIs - that is in complete opposition to my…
In my last post, I showed you to use FireWire on a Raspberry Pi with a PCI Express IEEE 1394 adapter. Now I'll show you how I'm using a new FireWire HAT and a PiSugar3 Plus battery to make a portable MRU, or 'Memory Recording Unit', to replace tape in older FireWire/i.Link/DV cameras. The alternative is an old used…
With an iron-clad court ruling, Listerine royalties represent a uniquely enduring cash-flowing asset.
It took me a long time to realize that Bell Labs was cool. You see, my dad worked at Bell Labs, and he has not done a single cool thing in his life except create me and bring a telescope to my thir…
So I was working on improving a DOS emulator, when I found that something seemingly trivial wasn’t working right when COMMAND.COM was asked to do the following:
A few months ago I introduced you to one of the more notable Apple pre-production units in my collection, a late prototype Macintosh Porta...
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 ...
jQuery has lately fallen out of favor in web development, but it still powers an estimated 74 percent of sites and paved the way for modern web frameworks.
