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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
The toccata is perhaps the most well-known work in the entire organ repertoire. Like many toccatas, it is probably a transcribed improvisation. It has been postulated that this was a test tune that Bach would play when trying out new organs. That would explain its crude character and the various hops between heavy…
I recently found that MAME supports running the SGI Indy while looking for ways to test some modifications I was making to the mips code in 9front. After a fair bit of elbow grease cinap and I (but mostly cinap) were able to get the old 9front indy kernel booting and running within mame. I thought I might as well…
From the Vikings to Trump: Greenland’s historic development negates recent White House territorial demands.
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…
What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.
So unlike all the others, yet people think it's the normal one.
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
The first 8-bit microprocessor, the TMX 1795 had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commerci...
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...
October 1982 TR-03.214 A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL by Michael S. Montalbano International Business Machines Corporation General Products Division Santa Teresa Laboratory San Jose, California A PERSONAL HISTORY OF APL Introduction I have several reasons for calling this talk a personal history. For one, I want to make it…
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
While running around South Alabama, I came across the sleepy shrimping capital of Bayou La Batre along the Mississippi Sound. The basis for Winston Groom’s (who grew up in Mobile County and f…
This is the second part of a three part series (I) examining the historical assumptions of Paradox Interactive’s 19th and early 20th century grand strategy game, Victoria II. Last week, we lo…
While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in physica…
Emulating the unknown: Controlling Sewing Machines with a Game Boy
As the 50th anniversary of the moon landing approaches, we honor Margaret Hamilton’s contribution with a portrait made of moonlight.
The IBM 1401 mainframe computer was announced in 1959 and by the mid-1960s had become the best-selling computer , extremely popular with me...
At some point in 1589, a Milanese cartographer named Urbano Monte made up his mind: his self-portrait needed updating. Monte carefully ...
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers
The beginnings of FM radio broadcasting in the USA
Along with almost getting hit by a car, he made important contributions to the atomic bomb's design.
The Nintendo Entertainment System. Is it the platonic ideal of an 8-bit video game system? Well, only because it’s so prominent and successful– it’s actually...
Typically when collecting something, be it coins, cars or CPU’s having the most pristine unblemished example is highly desirable. However, sometimes, the best example is one that isn’t perfect, in coin collecting it may be a rare double struck coin, or some other flaw that actually makes the coin more valuable.
