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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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Interview with Hansen Hsu, engineer at Apple during transition from OS 9 to OS X
The last episode, I said I wasn't sure there was such a thing as culture, but that's not the case. Every place I've worked has been a bit different, and often those differences had huge impacts on the software we built. The team where people roll their eyes at UX feedback will not have as simple of a product as a team…
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The History of Coffee (2015)
Who discovered coffee trees? Who invented coffee as we enjoy it now? Learn coffee history and its journey across the globe from the 9th century to today.
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The Rest of the Lenna Story
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
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The Potomac River Midair Collision
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
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The worst-selling Microsoft software product of all time: OS/2 for the Mach 20
Count 'em on one hand.
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Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that belonged to Canon
The origin of AWS and the story of Zimki, the world's first Platform as a Service that belonged to Canon.
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The Astonishing Prescience of Nam June Paik
I hadn’t heard of Nam June Paik until I went to his exhibition at Tate Modern a few weeks ago.
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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...
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How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?
One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden ag…
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Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…
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Well-Known Secrets of AmigaDOS
In keeping with the Commodore tradition of cost cutting, most consumer models of their Amiga line of computers came with severely watered down documentation. The Amiga 500 was an exception from this rule, but owners of later machines - such as the A1200 - may not have gotten any documentation for the command line part…
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King Alfred and India
[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Sou...
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Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
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The History of VisiCalc (1999-2018)
VisiCalc -- Links to the information from its creators, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, on this web site
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IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.
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Steve at NeXT
Late in 1989 I opened my email one morning and there was one from sjobs@next.com saying “come see us.” So I went and spent the day and failed to make a sale, but so did Mr. Jobs.
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Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
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The Origin of CAR and CDR in Lisp (2005)
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
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What World War I Can Teach Us about Misjudging Tech and Social Change (2020)
Stay informed with the latest news articles, press releases, in-depth analysis, and top headlines from our grantees around the world.
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July 5, 1687: When Newton explained why you don't float away
On this day in 1687, Isaac Newton published the Principia—a book that explained why apples fall, why planets don’t wander off, and why NASA is still lighting enormous tubes on fire to fling humans into orbit 337 years later.
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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.