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86Box: Why Not Pentium III?
When does “preservation” in emulation become impractical?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Commodore 900: Unix-like workstation/server that was eclipsed by Amiga (2020)
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
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Italian CPU – The Genesys B52 MMX
On this site you can read about thousands of processors models. And every year it is more and more difficult to write about some new (old) processors, since everything has been known for a long time. But there are also exceptions to the rule which we love to find. In 2021, I learned about one unusual processor, the…
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Somali Law (2013)
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Memories: Edinburgh ML to Standard ML
Dave MacQueen (with Robert Harper and John Reppy) has written a 100-page History of Standard ML . Here I offer my brief, personal and utterly subjective impressions of its early days, up to the deeply unfortunate schism that created what was then called Caml . Standard ML was a tragic missed opportunity. But even…
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Rescuing the Compuserve Collection
Follow a dedicated team of museum professionals and others as they race to preserve an important collection in record time.
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How Did Elevators Lose Their Music?
My informal survey reveals the decline of an insipid but historic genre
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“Xanadu Hypertext Documents” architecture and data structures, 2019 edition
1i1 “Xanadu ® ” and the Eternal-Flaming-X logo are registered trademarks of Project Xanadu .
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Everyone should learn the slide rule (2021)
The obsolescence of the slide rule is mostly un-mourned, but as with many technological obsolescences, we have lost something valuable with its demise. The type of thinking which goes along with us…
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How bad is QWERTY, really? A review of the literature, such as it is
Texts on this and that.
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X-ray reverse-engineering a hybrid module from 1960s Apollo test equipment
In this blog post, I reverse-engineer a hybrid module that was used for ground-testing of equipment from the Apollo space program. But fir...
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The strange case of BeOS, SRS and the silent Power Mac 6500
Tonight's story time: the Power Macintosh that wouldn't make any sound in BeOS R5, how I figured out the problem, and how I hacked the sound...
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Unix's technical history is mostly old now
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…
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Whatever happened to QuickTime?
QuickTime ruled from 1991-2019, and was bigger than Apple itself. But can you name what replaced it, and whether it works as well?
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Headlines compared: Polish newspapers from 1939 and news websites from 2022
These two quotes, repeated on various occasions, celebrations and remembrance days are supposed to remind us to learn from the past and avoid the mistakes our ancestors made.
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The City of London’s oldest document is currently on public display
A document that was written just a year after William the Conquer did his conquering has gone on display in the City of London.
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Overview of the 555-XXXX phone number
Phone numbers containing "555" are not just used for the movies, and yes, some numbers are indeed real.
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Japanese Words in Neuromancer
This is a reblog/translation of a post by Héctor García… During the 80s in the United States, Japan was started to be seen as the inevitable first economic power of the world. It went from be…
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The Reliability Trap: The crash of Emirates flight 521 (2020)
On the 3rd of August 2016, an Emirates Boeing 777 landing in Dubai attempted a last second go-around after touching down too far along the…
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Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
The quest for the earliest transcript of a computer game uncovers a surprisingly complex computer strategy game from the 1950s.
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The unusual bootstrap drivers inside the 8086 microprocessor chip
The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and ...
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Atari 800 Winter Solstice Celebration Demo 2022
Every December, I try to make a little wintery demo to exercise one of 8bitworkshop’s platforms. This year, I chose the Atari 800 to test out the new native TypeScript emulator in 8bitworkshop. You...
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The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
In August 1999, Apple announced the first Power Mac G4: 1 The Power Mac G4 is powered by the revolutionary new PowerPC G4 chip architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, and is the first personal computer in history to deliver supercomputer-level performance of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The…
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The First Three Discworld Games
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464 , which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word…
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Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...