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The Viterbi Algorithm at 50 (2017)
In a noisy world, it allows you to be heard.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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Bringing Emulation into the 21st Century
Implementing an 8080 emulator in a microservice architecture on top of kubernetes
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Enigma Crypto Transmission from KPH at 426 KHz and Shortwave
DA was a part of our KPH project from the beginning. She learned her trade at US Coast Guard master station NMC, adjacent to KPH. At NMC she earned the coveted gold lightning bolt radnoman’s insignia (there was no such thing as a radiowoman in the Coast Guard). She also acquired the salty vocabulary she needed to hold…
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You've heard of Markov chains. But who was Markov?
Harvard celebrates the 100th anniversary of a computational principle that was little noticed in its time, but that underlies all of modern science.
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Coaxial Goes to War
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
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Doom on ZPU
The last few days I spend some time on porting the beloved game DOOM to the ZPU CPU. For you who don't know what I am talking about, DOOM wa...
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The Tragic Death of Practically Everything
Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flak for the magazine's current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I'm not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank he
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food product…
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Stone: Leonardo da Vinci's Resume
“An informed patriotism is what we want. Are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? She is a shining city upon a hill.” - Ronald Reagan ~Largest Substack on the Right~. Click to read American Ambition, a Substack publication with…
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The Rise of Steel – Part I
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel.
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A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404 (2012)
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
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51 Star Flag (2011)
Math, Science and Technology tidbits written for the average person.
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2023 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Claudia Goldin
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2023 was awarded to Claudia Goldin "for having advanced our understanding of women’s labour market outcomes"
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The Nobel Peace Prize 2020
The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 was awarded to World Food Programme (WFP) "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict"
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Apprentice, Journeyman, and Master: The Medieval Guild (2018)
I became fascinated with guilds when I moved to Germany. Being an avid reader of all medieval history I could get my hands on, I was well aware of the Hansa (slang for Hanseatic) League’s ris…
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The last day of Constantinople
Discover how the fall of Constantinople in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire and transformed the great city into Ottoman Istanbul.
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Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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Doc Searls on Steve Jobs (1997)
S o Steve Jobs just shot the cloners in the head, indirectly doing the same to the growing percentage of Mac users who prefered cloned Mac systems to Apple's own. So his message to everybody was no different than it was at Day One: all I want from the rest of you is your money and your appreciation for my Art.
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VME Broken on AMD Ryzen
That’s VME as in Virtual-8086 Mode Enhancements, introduced in the Intel Pentium Processor, and initially documented in the infamous NDA-only Appendix H.
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CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the iPod Team (2016)
The Apple event tomorrow morning (US Pacific time), takes place at Town Hall, Building 4, Apple, Inc. in Cupertino. It has been almost 15 years since I visited there the last time. 'Hint: It&...
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The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC
SOLVED: The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC. For a hair over twenty years, I have been chasing the markings on the ...
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The President and the Bomb, Part IV
Why the problem of "the President and the bomb" isn't about the "crazy President," but something far more pernicious and possible.
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Altair at 50: Remembering the first Personal Computer
You might think that Apple, Commodore or perhaps Radio Shack made the first personal computer, but you’d be wrong.
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal g…