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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...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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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...
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Outdoor Sound Propagation in the U.S. Civil War (1999)
Students of military history know that acoustic refraction and unusual audibility have often played significant roles in the outcome of battles. Before electrical and wireless communications became common on the tactical level, the sound of battle was often the quickest and most efficient method by which a commander…
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PC Engine / TurboGrafx-16 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Damnit I slipped and (mostly) built an Amiga 500
EDIT - the original article has an image of the PCB with the floppy power connector mounted the WRONG WAY. This is the INCORRECT WAY. Do NO...
337
50 Years of Text Games: The End of a Journey
Some final thoughts on this epic expedition.
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35mm cinema film and digital audio
A while ago I decided to pick up some 35mm cinema film to help me experiment with projection optics.
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Nuclear Close Calls: Able Archer 83 (2018)
The election of President Ronald Reagan in 1980 saw the return of heightened Cold War tensions after a period of détente during the previous decade. The zenith of this escalation arguably came in 1983, when a NATO training exercise almost prompted nuclear war. Operation RYANAt a secret meeting of top Soviet…
340
The Smart Modem
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
341
Refurb Weekend: PowerBook 1400
The PowerBook 1400 is, and remains, my favourite laptop. It was everything the PowerBook 5300 should have been and more. It was my first l...
342
The worst dam idea: evaporating the Mediterranean to power Europe
Lessons from Atlantropa, the megaproject to unite Europe (& erase Africa)
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52% of YouTube videos live in 2010 have been deleted
YouTube is a platform and a community which live off of reuploads. With the privating of old unlisted videos, let's re-examine the relationship between YouTube and reuploading.
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The internet was designed with a narrow waist
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
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Visi On by VisiCorp – The obscure first full GUI for the IBM PC
Visi On was the first full GUI for the IBM PC. First demonstrated by VisiCorp at Fall Comdex 1982 and released at the end of 1983, just prior to the Apple Macintosh, it pre-dated the release of Microsoft Windows by several years.
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The Apple-1's unusual MOS clock driver chip
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced in 1976. This early microcomputer used an unusual type of storage for its disp...
347
8-bit 64K 1802 computer with front panel and serial port in an Altoids tin
Once upon a time, microcomputers were simple and easy to understand. So simple in fact that a kid like me, with no computer experience whatsoever, could actually understand them, build them, program them, and put them to work in his very own projects!
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Mille Bornes
Edmond Dujardin, Joseph Callenac and the design history of Mille Bornes.
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It’s 1997 and you want to build a website
You have a few options. How much time you got?
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The first thing that ever sold online was pizza (2018)
If you happened to live in Santa Cruz in 1994 you could sit down at your computer, open up your […]
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Lessons from Seoul's controversial privatized subway line
A dive into Seoul Metro's Line 9
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Installing an Ethernet card and video card and other upgrades for a Mac SE/30
But there’s only one slot, you say? It’s all a matter of using a clever part to adapt a pass-through.
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Getting a Psion 5 palmtop from 1997 online via PPP (and a Raspberry Pi)
Creating the PiRS232 and playing with the Pi over serial has been leading towards an idea - I wanted to create a small, battery powered device, a sidecar that I could carry with my Psion and use as portable Linux terminal. I also managed to turn it into an Internet...
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My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time
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The APL Source Code (2012)
Thousands of programming languages were invented in the first 50 years of the age of computing. Many of them were similar, and many followed a traditional, evolutionary path from their predecessors. What eventually became APL was first a mathematical notation, not as a computer programming language.
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King George and Tsar Nicolas Looked a Lot Alike
haha, everyone says we look alike but i dont see it
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The Life of MS-DOS
First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. This article details different versions and releases that all stemmed from Gary Kildall's QDOS.
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Why a Slide Rule Works
Why does lining up two scales of a slide rule let you multiply numbers?
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Flying the Unflyable Plane: The near crash of Air Astana flight 1388
A deeper analysis of the events which caused a Kazakh airliner to go out of control over Portugal in November 2018.