3421
Put 1.7MB onto 1.44MB Floppies (1999)
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
3422
An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
3423
PC DOS Reimagined
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
3424
The event that eventually led to Newton writing and publishing the Principia
The event that would eventually lead to Isaac Newton writing and publishing his magnum opus, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (the Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy), too…
3425
Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
The Pascal language was named after Blaise Pascal (see picture), a French mathematician who was a pioneer in computer development history. In 1641, at the age of eighteen, Pascal constructed the first arithmetical machine, arguably the first computer. He would improve upon the instrument eight years later. In 1650…
3426
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.
3427
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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Atari Tempest: Time-Lapse Photography (2016)
Thought we’d try something different this week. For the record, I am definitely a ‘point and click’ photographer – my mobile phone has always been my camera of choice. The e…
3431
Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
3432
Programming War Stories: macOS Freeware/Shareware (2019)
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
3433
An Ancient Piece of Computer Lore in a Place You’d Never Expect
Back in March of 2012 I was watching Duplicity and I noticed something odd about 28 minutes in:
3434
When you have too much memory for SheepShaver
When I first got my 133MHz BeBox (not new, sadly), it had "only" 32MB of memory and it had four more SIMM slots to fill. While Be only off...
3435
Bill Buxton: Multi-Touch Systems that I Have Known (1982)
Bill Buxton Microsoft Research Original: Jan. 12, 2007 Version: December 10th, 2025
3436
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.
3437
Lovelace – The Origin
This brief biographical sketch was done for Ada Lovelace Day 2009. I think I in was a pub at the time.
3438
Pac-Man: How We Played the Game
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a “perfect game”. But until now, no one’s ever told you how people really played the…
3439
Explore the Silk Roads
Experience history's greatest journey along the veins of the world. Relive the interactive journey from Europe to China, explore the map of the Silk Roads, or choose an outpost to trave back in time to.
3440
Smalltalk-87
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
3441
Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
3442
Why Finland Selected the F-35A (2021)
Back in 2017 I was fortunate enough to travel to RAF Lossiemouth together with a bunch of Finnish media courtesy of BAE Systems to get up and close with the Eurofighter Typhoon group operating ther…
3443
Who invented the alphabet?
Who really invented the alphabet? Although we are still uncertain about precisely where the world’s most influential communication system came from, we know more than we did 20 years ago.
3444
The Power Mac 4400
In November 1996, Apple released the Power Macintosh 4400 with a starting price of $1,725. Also sold as the Power Macintosh 7220, it’d be easy to write this machine off as just another grain of sand on the beige beach that was Apple’s product line in the 1990s. I mean, just look at this thing, pictured here with an…
3445
Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
3446
Non-PC compatible x86 computers (2007)
This is, so far, the only article of mine that's been completely deleted from Wikipedia. I've salvaged a copy of it from Search.com , since it's gone from the site's history now, and am putting it here until I decide what else to do with it. Non-PC compatible x86 computers For much of the time that…
3447
Blitzted: The Third Reich as a Society on Drugs
So my copy of Norman Ohler’s splendidly-titled Blitzed showed up. This could have been a really disappointing book – in the acknowledgments, Ohler mentions a Berlin DJ friend who told him Nazis took masses of drugs, and I can well imagine going from that beginning to lurid Hitler Channel kitsch. But Ohler has achieved…
3448
The (Almost) Definitive 486DX/50 Article
(Source: Infoworld, 25th May 1992, p56) We need to start at the beginning, because understanding the timeline of the 486 - Intel's 4th gener...
3449
The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
3450
The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...