3721
UCLA floor tiles decoded, pay homage to first internet message (2013)
A hidden message left by a UCLA architect in 2011 was recently uncovered in Boelter Hall, where sharp-eyed passersby can spot a coded note in the pattern of floor tiles.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
3722
History of “Adventure” for the Atari 2600
Of all the original games Atari put out for the VCS, Adventure may be the one that most people are familiar with today.
3723
MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
3724
Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVb: Work Hardening, or Hardly Working?
This week, we close out our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, although I ought to note that there will be at least one addendum di…
3725
Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
The work of Bletchley Park during the Second World War is inspirational-numerous codes were broken and incalculable lives were saved. It is important to remember that code breaking at Bletchley Par…
3726
The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
Serial Number of First Unix System In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC fo...
3727
RIP WC
So farewell then, Havant station’s 1930s railway toilets. It is doubtful whether many passengers will mourn their loss, but they are another piece of railway heritage that has slipped beyond …
3728
The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
3729
Fairchild, Fairchildren, and the Family Tree of Silicon Valley (2016)
Through an unprecedented series of technical, business, and cultural innovations, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation spawned hundreds of ventures that established Silicon Valley as a world center of entrepreneurial activity and technological leadership. Although the firm’s market valuation never exceeded $2.5…
3730
The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
3731
3732
‘Lost’ songs from the Middle Ages are brought back to life
An ancient song repertory will be heard for the first time in 1,000 years this week after being ‘reconstructed’ by a Cambridge researcher and a world-class performer of medieval music
3733
NES Graphics – Part 2
Part 1 discussed the components of NES background graphics – chr, nametable, palettes, and attributes. But this was only half of the story.
3734
A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
3735
3736
My New Old Macintosh SE/30 Computer
Acquiring and tricking out a 1989 Apple Macintosh SE/30, the greatest Mac of all time
3737
Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
3738
"Special register groups" invaded computer dictionaries for decades (2019)
Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...
3739
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.
3740
King George and Tsar Nicolas Looked a Lot Alike
haha, everyone says we look alike but i dont see it
3741
The history of Monokai
The history of the Monokai color scheme and the evolution of Monokai Pro
3742
Lessons from the Long Depression
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
3743
The Albuquerque "Broken Arrow" Nuclear Accident
In 1957, a B-36 nuclear bomber accidentally dropped a Mark 17 hydrogen bomb while landing at Kirtland Air Force Base just outside of Albuquerque NM. Mark 17 hydrogen bomb, on display at the Nationa…
3744
“Put that in your pipe and smoke it”
accept that fact if you can—1820: Irish English and associated with the obsolete figurative sense ‘to consider’ of the verb ‘smoke’
3745
I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to Draw (With 9front)
the computer lied
3746
Restoration of an IBM Thinkpad 701C Butterfly-keyboard laptop
Just over a year ago there was a discussion on Hacker News about the IBM ThinkPad 701c (the one with the lovely folding "butterfly" keyboar...
3747
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
3748
Welcome, the entire land – "Hello, world" in hieroglyphics (2009)
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.
3749
1973 implementation of Wordle was published by DEC (2022)
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…
3750