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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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When Kodak and Polaroid went to war
This part 2 of the Secret History of Polaroid and Edwin Land. Read part 1 for context. Kodak and Polaroid, the two most famous camera companies of the 20th century, had a great partnership for 20+ …
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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…
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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…
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One Plus One Equals Two (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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The $500M Dollar Typo
It's amazing how a series of small but unfortunate events can quickly add up to one very expensive problem. Like the time one person fat-fingered the wrong year on a mainframe JCL job, Ronald Reagan died, and the US postal service lost $500 million.
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Amiga 2000 – Codename: Tesseract (2021)
Amiga 2000 - codename Tesseract - the first part of a series of posts about building an Amiga 2000 from scratch and adding mods to it.
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Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail
Powell's is rightly famed as a destination for book lovers, and I finally made my pilgrimage last weekend. The perils of air travel limited the inevitable splurge -- I had to fit my haul into a single backpack -- but I wound up with some nifty ...
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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.
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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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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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Spider-Man (Neversoft) Decompilation Project Progress Checkpoint – May 2024
Progress report for the Spider-Man decompilation project
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Massachusetts Bodged Transistor Authority
in which two women are driven into madness by poorly documented cab signaling gear
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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
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"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 ...
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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 Myth of Medieval Small Beer (2017)
There is a story repeated so often that it has become a truth -- that medieval folk drank weak beer to avoid the perils of drinking water -- but it's a myth.
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Teletext on a BBC Computer in 2024
Before the Internet, if we wanted to read up-to-the-minute news or weather, we had Teletext. It is a low-bandwidth text standard that used to be sent via the hidden black border on TV signals.
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DHL pioneered the sharing economy (2016)
DHL was guaranteed timely delivery of critical business documents by giving away airplane tickets. That made it was a pioneer in the sharing economy.
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Harvard Railroad Economics Exam (1906)
Final exam from Dr. Stuart Daggett's Harvard economics course on Railroad Practice taught in 1906-07.
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Designed to Crash: the story of Antonov An-28 HA-LAJ and its demise
Nobody was killed when a Soviet-built Antonov An-28 crashed in England in 1993. But the accident did reveal a truly “shocking” design flaw…
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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
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The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Structured Text on the Internet before the World Wide Web
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FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
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Building a Galaksija
Note: this is the first part of three articles about my experience building a 1980s Yugoslav 8-bit computer called the Galaksija. This part is mostly focused on the technical aspects of building this…
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Fifty Years of Diff
The first manual was duplicated for a very small coterie. In order to channel queries directly to the horses’ mouths, authorship was attributed to individuals. Later, as authorship diffused, on the principle of”You touched it last; it’s yours,” authorship was attributed only in the segregated chapter of unofficial…
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Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…