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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 337 posts.
[18 Dec 2021] Updated Debian 11: 11.2 released [17 Nov 2021] Statement on Daniel Pocock [09 Oct 2021] Updated Debian 11: 11.1 released [09 Oct 2021] Updated Debian 10: 10.11 released [28 Aug 2021] DebConf21 online closes [15 Aug 2021] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Bullseye — a complete Linux solution for your school [14 Aug…
My POPL 2011 “Flash Fill” paper was the most important turning point in my research career. I went from searching for the hardest problem I can solve to searching for the simplest problem that will…
We do not see many vintage Japanese workstations in the West. We also do not see many portable workstations (of any make). So, what we really rarely see, are Japanese portable workstations. I feel …
The remains of four iron furnaces, operated by the Lackawanna Iron Works, are located in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
The creation of the original Macintosh has been extensively studied and written about, but what happened after it launched? What was it like to own a Macintosh in the mid-eighties? I intend to tell this story of the Macintosh through the pages of MacUser.
How do you boot a computer from punch cards when the computer has no operating system and no ROM? To make things worse, this computer req...
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
accept that fact if you can—1820: Irish English and associated with the obsolete figurative sense ‘to consider’ of the verb ‘smoke’
Japan's greatest inventor whose life span a formative period in the nation's history, Tanaka Hisashige built the Myriad Year Clock, a 1000-part masterpiece that's today a national treasure.
Or, why Keynesianism and functional finance demand politics.
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we built. The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team…
The origin of AWS and the story of Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that belonged to Canon.
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Humbolt was captivated by lush nature but loved humanity and the new technological developments. He believed that if we understand Nature and the laws governing her, we can create a sustainable future. He was the first Solarpunk and here are his ideas
Pink Floyd’s Young Lust has been a staple of rock radio for over 40 years. But many people are mystified about the section at the end when a “Mr. Floyd” in the United States attempts to make a collect call to “Mrs. Floyd” in England. There are many “beeps” and “boops” that for the untrained ear are just random sounds…
In a follow-up to his first article about Moses Schönfinkel, Stephen Wolfram looks for the whereabouts of Schönfinkel after 1924 through his family history.
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
