3511
Egyptian Fractions (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
3512
Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
3513
A mixed-format, mixed-architecture, mixed-sided diskette (2008)
As an IBM PC historian, one aspect of my hobby is archiving gaming software. (You can take that statement to mean anything you want — whatever you think of, you’re probably right.) At…
3514
Turbinia – An Uninvited Guest (2014)
Turbinia - An Uninvited Guest
3515
A Piece of Apple II History Cracks Open
The world of Apple II “cracking” has always held an interesting fascination for me – the thinking involved, the magic of tracing programs, and of course the “crack screens&#…
3516
Linux at 20, some personal memories (2011)
This is going to be long and rambling. If you're going to read it, you may want to wait until you're ill, and can't get out of bed, and your head is filled with cotton, and you're eating painkillers like they were candy. I don't want you to feel pain while reading. Being unconscious and having a speech synthesizer…
3517
All IP addresses are equal? “Dot-zero” addresses are less equal (2013)
In theory, all IP addresses are the same, and you can allocate them at random without a problem. 192.168.1.2 is certainly not better or worse than 192.168.1.15, right? But, in practice, certain IP addresses are regarded as "special" by some implementations and do not yield the same user experience.…
3518
Well-behaved bubbles often make history
The right kind of bubble brings together the right group of people at the right time — it's a coordinating mechanism that can do a surprising amount of good.
3519
3520
Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
3521
A Brief Introduction to Military Pillboxes
Explore some of the anti-invasion defences built across England during the First and Second World Wars.
3522
Ford 021C Concept Car (1999)
Marc Newson has been described as one of the most influential designers of his generation. He has worked across an extremely wide range of disciplines, and his clients include some of the best-known and most prestigious brands in the world spanning diverse sectors from manufacturing and technology to transportation…
3523
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?
3524
Alan Turing using math to repair his bike
Audio Link With the arrival of summer weather in many parts of the U.S., it’s time to think again about various outdoor activities. Wat...
3525
The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.
3526
Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
3527
Boswell’s Life of Johnson
James Boswell and the Nature of Genius
3528
The analog computer for the Nike missile system (2001)
Nike computer - Installed in class room, not BC van. From Rolf Goerigk Left rack has the power supplies - outputs about 7 different voltages. Top panel is switches, meters, voltage warning lights. (Note: in the van installation, this rack is on the right side of the computer.) Middle two racks - operational amplifies…
3529
Tonight we’re gonna log on like it's 1979
Teletypes may have killed a lot of forests by emitting every line to hard copy instead of a screen, but there's something to be said for t...
3530
Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
3531
The Rise of Steel Part II
Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II.
3532
3533
Neural Network on a Commodore 64 (1987)
Neural Network on a Commodore 64
3534
PC-XT Emulator on a ESP8266 (2018)
Can you run a 8086 PC-XT emulation with 640K RAM, 80×25 CGA composite video and a 1.44MB MS-DOS disk on a ESP12E without additional components? Yes, you can and I did. The CPU emulator is a po…
3535
How Not to Redact a Warhead
How the wrong settings on a photocopier has let us have a glimpse at a forbidden image of a modern thermonuclear warhead.
3536
Abel, the Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein
3537
3538
"All your base are belong to us" intro to my 2004 MIT Spam Conference talk
As I've mentioned before my talk at the 2004 MIT Spam Conference was about using one machine learning system to beat another. In that case ...
3539
The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress (2015)
Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
3540
Early Chinese World Maps (2010)
I recently came across this fascinating world map while researching the history of the Jesuit missions in seventeenth century China . Appar...