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Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory
a perfectly miserable son of a gun builds Silicon Valley
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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The First Hedge Fund
How A. W. Jones improvised his way to an investment style and structure that has persisted till today.
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I thought I found a bug
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:
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An Apple district manager's Macintosh Portable in 1989-91
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...
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The death of Glitch, the birth of Slack
[This post is about the day that Glitch failed, and how that failure created the opportunity to make Slack. We're sharing it here (out of chronological order) to mark 12 years since the famous pivot.] “We have to shut down the game.” Stewart Butterfield said. I looked at him
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AI or Ain't: Eliza
Explore the intriguing history of Eliza, a pioneering chatbot, and learn how to implement a basic version in Go, unraveling the roots of conversational AI.
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Running 9front on an emulated SGI Indy via MAME
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…
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Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers
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The Beginnings of FM Radio Broadcasting (2018)
The beginnings of FM radio broadcasting in the USA
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Scratches in 2001: A Space Osyssey (2018)
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.
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Mysteries of the Griffin iMate and the Apple Extended Keyboard II
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
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Bell Labs: An Institute of Creative Technology (2015)
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...
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Leaving Arizona – the Story of the Motorola 6800 part 2 and creation of the 6502
Part 2 of The Story of the Motorola 6800
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The Dying Computer Museum
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 …
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The history of Alt+number sequences
Code pages and custom keyboard handling.
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DOS APPEND
For a long time, I couldn’t quite grasp what the DOS APPEND command could possibly be good for. Until I came across a situation which APPEND was made for.
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ST Book, the Notebook Atari ST
A surprisingly innovative portable ST
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A History of Microwave Ovens
Some humans put a ~2.4GHz magnetron on a ventilated metal box with a fancy door.
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Wireless Amiga Tank Mouse
Taking a look at a Wireless Tank Mouse that I picked up from Sordan.ie and seeing how well it works with my Commodore computers.
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The Burial of William the Conqueror: A Comedy of Errors
William the Conqueror is one of those historical figures who need no introduction. Thanks to his famous victory at Hastings in 1066, he dra...
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With PowerPC, Windows CE and the WiiN-Pad Slate, Everyone's a WiiN-Er
Telemedicine (and mobile health generally) accumulated a hunk of public mindshare during the pandemic emergency, but speaking as someone wit...
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With more legal action on the horizon, how long before Archive.org closes?
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
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I am no longer attending vintage computer festivals
I spent some time trying to figure out when to make this announcement in a way that didn’t seem like direct sabotage; the day before the VCF East event seems about right. Years ago, clearing …
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The Dogma of Otherness (1986)
The Dogma of Otherness insists that all voices deserve a hearing, that all points of view have something of value to offer.