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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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…
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
The other night I was mindlessly scrolling about on my phone through Instagram, as one does when they really ought to go to bed but are stuck being entertained instead of resting, when I came upon …
A 1987 technical introduction to OS/2, covering its architecture, multitasking capabilities, API, and kernel system services.
This article will focus on discussing why the ancient text editor 'ed' works the way it does.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
A set of scratches in Stanley Kubrick’s '2001: A Space Odyssey' is visible at the same moments and locations within the frame in most copies of the movie.
A celebration into the IBM PC, the Model F/XT keyboard, where it came from and what it became
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
Blog about vintage computers and homebrewing computers.
With some recent interest in undocumented opcodes and microcode on modern Intel chips, I decided to do a proper writeup on what I found out while researching and playing around with the venerable 80286 ("Beige Unlock"?).
“I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”
Angelo Pesce's homepage & blog on computers, graphics and other things.
Transcript of VHF channel 16 on the night of the Estonia disaster.
Main Menu - click above Man, thermometer, one legged stool & vat of nitro 1870 . Alfred Nobel chose Ardeer, in Ayreshire, as the ...
This week I finished the most recent book in my self-guided study of 20th century technology, namely The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation, by Jon Gertner. As the title implies, it’s a chronicle of research and development wing of AT&T, a history that lasts...
Part 2 of The Story of the Motorola 6800
Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became …
Floating-point numbers are very useful for scientific programming, but early microprocessors only supported integers directly. 1 Although...
Learn about public engagement activities from the American Physical Society
I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but just 1 year ago when I started working on C64 OS, I didn't have the first clue how the C64 Keyboard worked. I knew there was a thing called the keyboard buffer, but I had cloudy thoughts of it being inside the keyboard itself. When I had to actually write the keyboard scanning…
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
Did you know that Rome is studded with cannon balls? Not many know that the city is full of sites where you can still see cannon balls. We’ll accompany you and share with you the story of the many cannon balls you can see around the city. Come and have a look for yourself! Come to Rome to see the city and its cannon…
We owe computers not to Charles Babbage, but to the invention of electronically-controlled working memory.
One of the first questions anyone asks about past societies is, ‘how many people were there?’ It is one of those basic bits of information and generally speaking those of us who teach t…
The biggest competition for Office 2000 was…Office 97. –Realization at the end of the project
