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E-COM: The $40M USPS project to send email on paper
E-COM was a $40 million US Postal Service project to deliver email on paper. Why it failed, and why spammers were its only real customers.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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Microsoft's 1986 IPO
Its market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million
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Swedish Campground (2004)
We thought it was important for the user to be able to invoke every menu command directly from the keyboard, so we added a special key to the keyboard to invoke menu commands, just like our predecessor, Lisa. We called it the "Apple key"; when pressed in combination with another key, it selected the corresponding menu…
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RFCs: Blueprints of the Internet
Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’ve all agreed on…
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Mister Macintosh (2004)
Steve Jobs often came by Texaco Towers after dinner, to see what was new, and we'd usually show him whatever recent progress we made. Sometimes he'd be pissed off about something, but other times he'd be really excited about a new idea.
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The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)
Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
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The Greatness of Text Adventures
Text adventures are weird. They are so weird I don’t know how to write this article, so prepare to read something even more rambly than usual. Normally, when this happens, I decide not to publish the article. But
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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Xerox Alto Source Code (2014)
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the…
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Sony DTC-700 audio DAT player/recorder
What offers the convenience of a cassette tape, and the sound quality of a CD? Digital Audio Tape (DAT) does. So why wasn’t it more successful?
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Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Adventure Prototype Recovered for the C64
Cancelled & Unreleased Video Games
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A swashbuckling tale of Italian software piracy – 1983-1993 (2022)
The history of Italian software piracy from 1983 to 1993, retail shops & national distribution: how cracked games were sold as legitimate.
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The Useful Personal Computer
To market their new products to people who had not already spent years pining for a computer of their own, the creators of the second wave of microcomputers had to face head on the question of what…
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A Lost IBM PC/at Model? Analyzing a Newfound Old Bios
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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ZX Spectrum graphics magic
Hey friends! (Or just curious readers peeking under the hood of good old retro games).
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Who invented deep residual learning?
Who invented residual neural networks?
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Plastic Before Plastic: How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
How gutta-percha shaped the 19th century
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Kernighan's Lever
Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?
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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer
You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.
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Residential Networking over Telephone
Recently, I covered some of the history of Ethernet's tenuous relationship with installed telephone cabling . That article focused on the earlier and more business-oriented products, but many of you probably know that there have been a number of efforts to install IP networking over installed telephone wiring in a…
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The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
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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Morse Code in Tubular Bells (2021)
A quick look at how the movie The Exorcist from 1973 has links to the late great Alan Turing via Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells, Scotland and Amateur Radio. It’s Halloween so figured why not throw some horror in the mix.
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Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
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The War on the Walkman
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.
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A Tektronix TDS 684B Oscilloscope Uses CCD Analog Memory
I have a Tektronix TDS 684B oscilloscope that I bought cheaply at an auction. It has 4 channels, 1 GHz of BW and a sample rate of 5 Gsps. Those are respectable numbers even by today’s standards. It’s also the main reason why I have it: compared to modern oscilloscopes, the other features aren’t nearly as impressive…
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The History of Album Art
Matt Ström-Awn · Designer, leader, and coach focused on building exceptional products and teams.
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VisiCalc on the Apple II
In 1978, Bricklin and Frankston took out a loan to develop "Calcu-ledger," a tool that could project the fiscal health of taking out that very loan
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Using Sun Ray thin clients in 2025
setting up 20 year old hardware is bound to work first try, right? ... right?