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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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The Last Express
A moving train at night is an incredible place to hear stories. Like a campfire.
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Early computer art by Barbara Nessim (1984)
Whilst searching for something else entirely I stumbled across these images and was struck by just how beautiful they are. The September 1984 (Vol 9, No 10) ...
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Apple R&D (1989): Mousing is faster than keyboarding, but users don't believe it
Originally published in the AppleDirect, August, 1989 Republished as Chapter 6, in Tog on Interface
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OS/2 2.0, Summer ’91 Edition
In a fascinating example of poor timing, disk images of OS/2 2.0 pre-release level 6.605 from July/September 1991 were missing for over 25 years, only to show up literally one day after after the 25th anniversary of the OS/2 2.0 release (big thanks to a very helpful reader!).
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86Box: Why Not Pentium III?
When does “preservation” in emulation become impractical?
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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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Microsoft's 1986 IPO
Its market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million
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A Typical Day for PFC Bradley Manning
Chelsea Manning enlisted in the United States Army in 2007. Back then, she was known as Bradley Manning and struggled with gender identity disorder. This identity crisis made it difficult for Manning to fit into the military’s masculine and patriarchal environment. Throughout Manning’s career in the military, it was…
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The truth about C and Unix history
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
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The GDR and Vietnam: From Fake Coffee to Coffee Empire
New stories from the East German specialists behind this Cold War project
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Amazon EC2 Beta (2006)
Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]
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How the Father of Claymation Lost His Company
Will Vinton brought clay to life with characters like the California Raisins and the Noid -- until Nike billionaire Phil Knight stepped in and bought the business for his son.
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A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air […]
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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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Noam Chomsky: Education is Ignorance (1995)
The Noam Chomsky Website.
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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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How medieval astronomers made trig tables
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
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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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Web Sockets Now Available In Google Chrome
Starting in the Google Chrome developer channel release 4.0.249.0, Web Sockets are available and enabled by default. Web Sockets are "TCP f...
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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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What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
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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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“Flower of Battle,” a combat manual created in the first decade of the 1400s
Fior di Battaglia = Flower of Battle = Flos Duellatorum , a combat manual created in the first decade of 15th cent. "Like people today,...
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Programming War Stories: Connectix
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
On the March 10, 2025 episode of Do You Speak Tech?, I sat down with two names woven into the early fabric of modern computing: Larry Masinter and Frank