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1,100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets
1100 Declassified U.S. Nuclear Targets from 1956 on the interactive NukeMap. Choose a city and a bomb size, and detonate. See what happens.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
In August 1999, Apple announced the first Power Mac G4: 1 The Power Mac G4 is powered by the revolutionary new PowerPC G4 chip architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, and is the first personal computer in history to deliver supercomputer-level performance of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The…
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Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
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The History of Windows 95
The Dawn of Microsoft's Golden Age
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Exploring Bauhaus: Revolutionary design school that shaped modern world
Bauhaus was a german art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that transcended traditional boundaries, boldly embracing the fusion of form and function. The founder of the school, Walter Gropius, believed in the "fundamental unity of the arts" and he anticipated the challenges that 20th-ce
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1980: MUD
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
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Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998)
In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could…
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Hawking Hawking
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
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“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
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The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes
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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Mainframes as a lifestyle choice
I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…
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The most expensive typefaces (2019)
The most expensive typeface I encountered is JHA Bodoni Ritalic, at €4,401.99 (almost $5,000) for a single font.
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Stanford students recreate 5,000-year-old Chinese beer recipe
Students brewed an ancient beer during class with Stanford archaeologist Li Liu, who discovered evidence of earliest beer-making in China as part of her recent research.
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The Mortgaging of Sierra Online
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
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Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
The Renaissance history of automimesis, and a proposal for research
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Spider-Man (Neversoft) Decompilation Project Progress Checkpoint – May 2024
Progress report for the Spider-Man decompilation project
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Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…
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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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Minstrel ZX80 Clone
Here is a new ZX80 clone that I have called the Minstrel. It is a fairly accurate clone electrically to the ZX80, using the same chips and ...
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The First Three Discworld Games
As a man of wide-ranging curiosity, Terry Pratchett was drawn to personal computers early. In 1981, he purchased a Sinclair ZX81 in kit form and soldered it together successfully. He soon upgraded to a Sinclair Spectrum and then to an Amstrad CPC 464 , which was his first computer strong enough to run a practical word…
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Why the Greenwich meridian moved
Walk about 100 meters east of the Observatory's meridian line. Slow down to a crawl as your GPS approaches 0 degrees, 0 minutes, 0 seconds longitude. There's no sign and no line on the ground.
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Reverse-engineering a mysterious Univac computer board
The IBM 1401 team at the Computer History Museum accumulates a lot of mystery components from donations and other sources. While going thr...
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Follow This Rule — If You Want To Be Popular (1922)
Update: See this post for a free ePub eBook version of this long post. From a 1922 issue of The American Magazine, something that is just as true today as back then. In fact, it probably has even m…
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AmigaOS 4.1 Final Edition Update 1 – Pre-Release for the AmigaOne X5000
Hyperion Entertainment
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →