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Why a Slide Rule Works
Why does lining up two scales of a slide rule let you multiply numbers?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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Ten years after first shipping Openmoko Neo1973
Exactly 10 years ago, on July 9th, 2007 we started to sell+ship the first Openmoko Neo1973. To be more precise, the webshop actually opened a few hours early, depending on your time zone. Sean announ
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USB-C done cheap: when 2 ports become 1 (2020)
How PC hardware is implementing USB-C in a way that may or may not violate standards.
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A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
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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.
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Ken and Roberta (2011)
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
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A helicopter and boats to perform a rare ceremony at the Tower of London
Next week, a fairly rare ceremony will take place in and around the Tower of London, and it's even more special than usual this time.
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Why the Getty Center Is the Safest Place for Art During a Fire (2019)
Visit our Los Angeles museums and library, interact with art, and access free research tools.
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AT&T's Hobbit Microprocessor (2023)
An unexpected journey for AT&T with it's own low power processor
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Joshua Norton, Emperor of the United States
In the mid-1800s, the United States had an emperor -- and he was supreme.
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Vetinari's Clock (2011)
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.
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The Birth of Standard Error
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
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Somali Law
“ Few societies can so conspicuously lack those judicial, administrative, and political procedures which lie at the heart of the western conception of government. The traditional northern Somali political system has no chiefs to run it and no formal judiciary to control it. Men are divided amongst political units…
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Reverse-engineering an airspeed/Mach indicator from 1977
How does a vintage airspeed indicator work? CuriousMarc picked one up for a project, but it didn't have any documentation, so I reverse-en...
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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Unravelling Konami's Arcade DRM
It’s well known that Konami doesn’t have complex protection on its arcade systems. Programmed World was a fan-made network replacement and update service for Konami arcade games with no support outside of Japan. Nothing of its scale and quality had been seen before, and nothing has been seen since, despite other…
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An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end (2011)
Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March & 9 April 2016, and 28 December 2023. The…
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A new compression algorithm to make Google Chrome updates small
We have just started using a new compression algorithm called Courgette to make Google Chrome updates small. We have built Google Chrome to ...
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Book Review: 1587, a Year of No Significance
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest
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Debian 10.3
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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The origins of the steam engine (2023)
An essay with interactive animated diagrams
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The Battlefield After the Battle
Today we’re going to talk about what a pre-modern battlefield might look like after the battle is over. Obvious content warning, since this post is going to talk about (and show pictures of) …
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