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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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Reverse engineering a Hit Clip (2013)
It’s hard to see a child outside today without some kind of iDevice pumping high fidelity 192kbps stereo lossless audio into their shiny white headphones, but BACK IN MY DAY, the iPod hadn’t been invented yet. Pickings were slim. Walkmen were outdated, CD players were pricey and would skip if bumped around despite…
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Curl 25 Years Online Celebration
curl turns 25 years old and what better way to celebrate this than to join fellow curl friends, developers and fans online on the exact birthday? At 17:00 UTC March 20, 2023. We run an Online birthday party open for everyone to join. Consider muting yourself when you join, but feel encouraged to leave the … Continue…
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Edward C. Stone, 1936-2024
Caltech mourns the loss of Edward C. Stone, leader of humanity’s first foray into interstellar space.
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Why did clothing become boring?
An investigation into when, how, and why everyone started dressing the same — and what it was like when they didn't
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The decline and fall of the hit instrumental song
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
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How we paid for the War on Terror
Or, why Keynesianism and functional finance demand politics.
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The PalmOS powered wristwatch from Fossil
Imagine a smartwatch you could load any PalmOS app you wanted onto. We had that... about 20 years ago.
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Passing for Human: Philip K. Dick in Vancouver (2018)
Philip K. Dick arrived in Canada on February 16th, 1972, as guest of honour for the 2nd Vancouver Science Fiction Convention ( VCON-2 ), an all-expenses-paid invitation, jointly sponsored by the science fiction societies of Simon Frazer University and the University of British Columbia. He was 43 years old, the author…
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That WoW server blade
A post by August Lilleaas, published August 08, 2014.
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They Took Our Myths
Back to: A product review, and some musing | Forward to: What's The Best Medium For A Storyteller In 2015 And Beyond?
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Toshiba laptop service manuals and the sorry state of copyright law
As you would be no doubt already aware, I run a section of my blog here devoted to the free sharing of laptop service manuals. This is a side project I have run for the last three years, gathering as many repair manuals as I could find on the internet and rehosting them on my website for anybody to download and use.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark as a Black-and-White Silent Film (2014)
(Note: This posting is for educational purposes only.)I’m assuming the phrase “staging” came out of the theatre world, but it’s equally at home (and useful) in the movie world, since the term (roughly defined) refers to how all the various elements of a given scene or piece are aligned, arranged, and coordinated. In mo
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Rollercoaster Tycoon (Or, MicroProse's Last Hurrah)
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…
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Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
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Hacking with Style: TrueType VT220 Font (2009)
VT220 TrueType font
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A legal and moral question: The crash of Turkish Airlines flight 981 (2021)
The story of how McDonnell Douglas’s corporate culture led to the deaths of 346 people in one of the deadliest plane crashes of all time.
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Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
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IBM paperweight teardown: Reverse-engineering 1970s memory chips
I recently received a vintage IBM paperweight from the early 1970s that showcases some memory chips. 1 When IBM started using integrated ...
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This Old SGI: notes and memoirs on the Silicon Graphics 4D series (1996)
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…
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The Tomb of Queen Esther in Persia
“How much is the taxi to Khomeini Square?” “ Gheymati nadore, it does not cost anything”, the old taxi driver spreads his arms...