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Book Review: 1587, a Year of No Significance
Finalist #15 in the Book Review Contest
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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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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Live Streaming a Macintosh Plus
Since recording a handful of C Programming on System 6 videos, I've occasionally wanted to live-stream the more casual daily programming being done on my Macintosh Plus. After getting all of the pieces together, I now have a working self-hosted broadcasting setup.
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Talking with the Moon: Inside Apollo's premodulation processor
The Apollo missions to the Moon required complex hardware to communicate between Earth and the spacecraft, sending radio signals over hund...
365
Childhood toys: 40 years on 2-XL works just fine
Sitting and literally gathering dust on a shelf has been my childhood 2-XL toy . A few years ago I turned it on and it seemed to work but th...
366
Sanyo Triple Five
Even though I seem to have terrible luck with x86-based computers, that doesn’t mean I have to take it lying down. I can go out there and cause even worse things to happen to me. Like, for instance, buying a broken super-budget PC-incompatible from 1982.
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The Soviet Union’s Nuclear Icebreakers
If you want to watch the video first, it is below
368
The sad history of Unicode printf-style format specifiers in Visual C++ (2019)
Getting ahead of the standard, which went a different way.
369
The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for the Mach 20
Count 'em on one hand.
370
Reverse-engineering the LM185 voltage reference chip and its bandgap reference
Many circuits, such as a computer power supply or a phone charger, require a stable voltage reference, but it's harder than you might expec...
371
The Intel 80376 – A legacy-free i386 with a twist (2010)
25 years after the introduction of the 32 bit Intel i386 CPU, all Intel compatibles still start up (and wake up!) in 16 bit stone-age mode, and they have to be switched into 32/64 bit mode to be usable.
372
CR+LF Has a Long History
The ASR33, like most teletypes of the era, works at a fixed rate. It does 10 characters per second. It is 110 Baud, using 1 start, 8 data (i...
373
The Apple-1's shift-register memory
Apple's first product was the Apple-1 computer, introduced exactly 46 years ago, on April 11, 1976. This early microcomputer used an unus...
374
Apple II Desktop Updated
The Apple II Desktop has been updated. Version 1.2 Alpha 48 includes a ton of updates. The program is now available in eight languages. Updated features include: General Added Sample.Media folder with some samples of various file types.Improved appearance of keyboard shortcuts in buttons.Improve appearance of ()^…
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Building Basilisk II for iOS (2021)
I’ve had numerous requests for a guide to building BasiliskII on iOS. Let me know of anything is unclear or would benefit from more details!
377
PostScript: A Digital Printing Press
CHM publicly releases the source code for the breakthrough printing technology, PostScript.
378
Bytecode interpreters for tiny computers (2007)
I've previously come to the conclusion that there's little reason for using bytecode in the modern world, except in order to get more compact code, for which it can be very effective. So, what kind of a bytecode engine will give you more compact code?
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Old tech is haunted
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
381
Starting FORTH (1981)
Starting Forth has always been the fun way to learn Forth programming. This free, online edition uses updated code that runs on modern Forth systems.
382
Update on the fake story about the river laborers paying people to whip them
As you might remember from a few months ago , there was a story going around that some economists just looooved to tell. The story had all sorts of attributes that you might expect would make economists happy , including a paradox in which apparently bad behavior (whipping people to get them to work harder) was…
383
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
384
Tolkien’s Little-Known Original Drawings for the First Edition of “The Hobbit”
A lively new look at one of the most beloved fantasy stories of all time.
385
Cash, Canadians and CPUs: Intel's 'Lost' Early Microprocessor
The story of Microsystems International and the Intel 4005
386
Reverse-engineering the waveform generator in a 1969 breadboard
How hard could it be to fix a vintage solderless breadboard that doesn't quite work? The "elite 2 circuit design test system" below combin...
387
A History of HTML (1998)
The events and circumstances that led to the World Wide Web's current popularity
388
Collections: Strategic Airpower 101
This week, I’m going to offer a fairly basic overview of the concept of strategic airpower, akin to our discussions of protracted war and nuclear deterrence. While the immediate impetus for t…
389
Long Now Years: Five-digit Dates and Y10K-compliance at Home
The Long Now Foundation fosters long-term thinking. Our work encourages imagination at the timescale of civilization — the next and last 10,000 years — a timespan we call the long now.
390
How much did the Apollo program cost?
The U.S spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo ($309 billion when adjusted for inflation). This dataset provides annual expenditures and additional cost…