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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
The PiDP-11 is a modern replica of Digital Equipment Corporation’s influential PDP-11 minicomputer. Before, we had a computer on every desk and in every home–and long before they were in every pocket–computers were large, intimidating, and locked in special rooms at universities and corporations. The PDP series paved…
One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now native...
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
I was 9 years old. A revision of the notebook containing my first Z80 assembly language program
Smackeyackys excellent adventure I was somewhere around eight or nine when the 8 bit era of personal computers started getting into action....
Last week, after months of restoration, we finally got the vintage Xerox Alto computer to boot ( details ) and run programs. However, so...
It is human nature to pick a hero, place it on a pedestal, and forget everybody else. We have limited memory after all so remembering only a few things may not be a choice but a necessity. If you were to ask players for the name of a game made in the 90s, unmistakably Mario, Sonic, and DOOM would come up over and over…
I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked...
Project Deluge (Lot Page) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (List) Project Deluge - Microsoft Xbox (Matched List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (List) Project Deluge - Sega Dreamcast (Matched List) Discuss this release on our Discord server!
Cancelled & Unreleased Video Games
The pre-internet era was full of wonderful and very powerful systems that are well forgotten now, but we definitely can learn from them, try to understand why we had an enormous degradation in the 1990s and 2000s, and why we are enjoying hypertext systems renaissance now.
People want things to be cheaper and easier and faster than they are. That doesn’t seem very extraordinary, does it? I mean, it’s not really news. In fact, the opposite would be news…
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we revisit a first-hand account of designing the Lunar Module digital autopilot, and compare the approach used then with the way it could be done today.
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
Folks, I’ve said I’m not a fan of Wikipedia for nearly ten years now. I used to mention it in presentations until I found that eighteen-year-olds would confront me at the end, like I sp…
We didn't patent VisiCalc at Software Arts because you really couldn't patent software prior to 1981, and VisiCalc was shown to the public in 1979.
G We’ll just talk general ideas, what the concept of it was. Then I’ll get down to going specifically through the story. Then we will actually get to where we can start talking down scenes, in the end I want to end up with a list of scenes. And the way I work generally is I figure a code, a general measuring stick…
Phone numbers containing "555" are not just used for the movies, and yes, some numbers are indeed real.
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…
Why do the 8-bit designs of the 1970s still generate so much interest?
When a Southern Airways DC-9 loses both engines during a storm, an attempt to land it on a rural highway goes horribly wrong.
In the age of smart devices and instant entertainment, can a medium as old as MUDs survive? Driven entirely by text, these Multi-User Dimensions ― or Dungeons,
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…
