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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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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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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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The X Window System didn't immediately have X terminals
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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The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
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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…
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Old graph paper
I found an old pad of graph paper in my father's desk and was reminded of the days of plotting by hand.
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Mac and the iPad: History Repeats Itself
For those of us around Apple for the launch of the 1984 Mac, things are awfully familiar.
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When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
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Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018)
When I was young I owned a PlayStation 1 (PS1). It was one of the first, if not the first, game consoles I owned and it had a profound effect on my future. I can trace the history of how I got involved in computers back to playing and modding
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Morse Code in Tubular Bells (2021)
A quick look at how the movie The Exorcist from 1973 has links to the late great Alan Turing via Mike Oldfield’s album Tubular Bells, Scotland and Amateur Radio. It’s Halloween so figured why not throw some horror in the mix.
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Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
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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…
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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...
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Exploring PDP-1 Lisp (1960)
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
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Umberto Eco: Ur-Fascism
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
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Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
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Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
I have just released a serial port based Amiga disk and file transfer tool, amigaXfer .
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Debian 11 “Bullseye” Released
[18 Dec 2021] Updated Debian 11: 11.2 released [17 Nov 2021] Statement on Daniel Pocock [09 Oct 2021] Updated Debian 11: 11.1 released [09 Oct 2021] Updated Debian 10: 10.11 released [28 Aug 2021] DebConf21 online closes [15 Aug 2021] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Bullseye — a complete Linux solution for your school [14 Aug…
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Grumpy Gamer – SCUMM Notes from the C64
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Thoughts about the difference between European and American H/W and S/W design
I have just recently discovered that my previous post about Commodore BASIC went modestly viral, not only featuring on Hacknernews but getting its own story on Hackaday . Gosh. This in itself has provoked some discussion. Its also resulted in a lot of people telling me that NO COMMODORE WAS…
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The War on the Walkman
The Sony Walkman is now iconic of the 1980s, eliciting nostalgia for the ‘good old days’ of owning music, rather than renting it.
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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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A Tektronix TDS 684B Oscilloscope Uses CCD Analog Memory
I have a Tektronix TDS 684B oscilloscope that I bought cheaply at an auction. It has 4 channels, 1 GHz of BW and a sample rate of 5 Gsps. Those are respectable numbers even by today’s standards. It’s also the main reason why I have it: compared to modern oscilloscopes, the other features aren’t nearly as impressive…
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Restoring a Sun SPARCstation IPX part 1: PSU and NVRAM (2020)
Repairing a dead power supply and replacing the NVRAM in a vintage UNIX workstation.
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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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