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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…
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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead
The history of defect tracking databases in Windows.
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
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Secret colours of the Commodore 64
In 1991 I was fourteen years old. It would be fair to say I was obsessed with computers. I proudly owned a brown ‘breadbox’ Commodore 64 with an exotic upgrade - an Oceanic 5.25” disk drive:
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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
I want to speak to your manager.
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Photos from inside the Baikonur Cosmodrome
Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, Даже если его там нет. Нельзя заходить в спальню к богу, За дверью большой секрет - Ундервуд. Буквально вчера, 02 июня 2015 года, исполнилось 60 лет колыбели мировой космонавтики и крупнейшей отечественной космической гавани - космодрому Байконур. За эти годы…
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Vladimir Voevodsky has died
The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics.Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal.
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Most detailed ever photograph of The Night Watch goes online
Op 8 juli 2019 start het Rijksmuseum Operatie Nachtwacht, het grootste en meest veelzijdige onderzoeks- en restauratieproject van Rembrandts meesterwerk in de geschiedenis. Operatie Nachtwacht heeft tot doel het schilderij optimaal te behouden voor de toekomst.
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
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Celebrating 20 Years of MDN
MDN turns 20! Let's look at how we started, how MDN became the most trusted resource for web developers, the impact it's had on the open web, and yes, there's cake, too.
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The Biggest and Weirdest Commits in Linux Kernel Git History
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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Why do old statues have such small penises?
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
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A look at my BBS Software from '93
The buzz around Mastodon’s federated social network has made me nostalgic about bulletin board systems in the early nineties. It was an era that is unknown to most people. It was social networking ...
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The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils (2022)
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at
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A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
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How the Devteam Conquered the iPhone
The summer of 2007 was an eventful one if you were into cell phones. It all started on June 29 when Apple announced the release of the iPhone. If you have never taken the time to watch the full keynote, I highly recommend it.
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Weirdos in the depression
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
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Y Combinator When No One Cared
Recently I came across one of the first pitch letters I sent to journalists about Y Combinator. It was from the first few months of YC’s existence and it’s a snapshot of what our thinking was way...