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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
Fantasy consoles like the Pico-8 are a great idea. A fantasy console provides a standardised and portable environment in which developers can explore ideas within creative constraints. The Z-machine , developed by Infocom in 1979, is the earliest fantasy console I know, although this is probably the first time it’s…
Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today.
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
Hieroglyphs where used for over 3000 years by the Ancient Egyptians. Luckily, they are still studied and researched today, otherwise I couldn't enlist others' help in my crazy follies.
While some have traced Wordle to Lingo, a game show that started in 1987, they’ve missed an earlier implementation: WORD was published in 101 Computer Games by Digital Equipment Corp. in 1973 and l…
In the early 2000s the Xbox was released. We are nearing the 20 year anniversary so its time to dive into the A20 "hack".
It’s time to take down the future of law enforcement. Following on from my discovery that RoboCop arcade has bootleg protection, see here , I decided it would be fun to crack it. TL;DR –…
Visit our Los Angeles museums and library, interact with art, and access free research tools.
In the excellent Discworld series the character Lord Vetinari has a clock in his waiting room which is designed to tick irregularly in order to make his visitor feel ill at ease. Inspired by a post featured on Hackaday I decided to build my own version of this clock with a simple and easy to make design.
I think it touches on two of the most fundamental aspects of human nature. We all like doing something constructive, where we can see that we are creating something from virtually nothing, and we all have a desire to nurture or look after things. This is what the game is all about. You spend hours painstakingly…
I am posting this assortment of notes and observations as a kind of "thank you" to the numerous people who have replied to my posts in the past. The free flow of information is the life-blood of the internet community, and this is my feeble attempt to maintain that flow, while at the same time repaying the kindness…
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?
On this day in 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia—a book that explained why apples fall, why planets don’t wander off, and why NASA is still lighting enormous tubes on fire to fling humans into orbit 337 years later.
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art . It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following:
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
This week, we’re doing another ‘silly’ topic, but this being me, it is a silly logistics topic, because – as the saying goes – amateurs talk tactics, professionals tal…
Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is.
A brief account of hacking the Yamaha DX9's firmware ROM to make its functionality more closely match the DX7.
Or, the early history of Intel Corporation
We always thought of the Macintosh as a fast computer, since its 68000 microprocessor was effectively 10 times faster than an Apple II, but our Achilles heel was the floppy disk. We had limited RAM, so it was often necessary to load data from the floppy, but there we were no faster than an Apple II. Once we had real…
This is a classic English poem containing about 800 of the worst irregularities in English spelling and pronunciation. Will Snellen wrote a PDF version using the phonetic alphabet . You can hear some of it pronounced mostly correctly in videos here:
I program my home computer, beam myself into the future
