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Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
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World's oldest periodic table chart found in St. Andrews
A periodic table chart discovered at the University of St Andrews is thought to be the oldest in the world.
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The Death Of The Hacker: InfoWorld 1986
Update: Date typo in post title fixed! I came across this on Google Books, going through some old issues of InfoWorld I’d read back in the day: Click = big For those who want text, see after …
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The Beatles’ collaborative notes: Three ways to write a song
"Just say whatever comes into your head each time..."
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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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Fifteen Years of Fedora
Read this Magazine article to learn about the history of Fedora, the original Fedora Core 1 release, and how much has changed over 15 years.
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Experimenting with QUIC
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The SPDY protocol , which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, i...
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The Secrets of Medieval Fonts
One of the fundamental things in a medieval book is letters – those symbols that fill up page after page and that make up meaning. Each one of us human beings writes differently and considering tha…
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Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows
Bill Gates was as aware as everyone else of the abundant deficiencies of his own company’s hastily procured operating system for the IBM PC. So, in September of 1981, before the PC had even shipped and just a handful of months after VisiCorp had started their own similar project , he initiated work at Microsoft on a…
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Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
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British Rail’s short experiment with travelling pubs
It's May 1949 and British Rail was showing off its latest idea to please the public - a travelling pub.
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How to grip Bronze Age swords
An ordinary Late Bronze Age European sword of the so-called Naue type II. It has a bronze hilt of hollow scales riveted to the...
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Conquest of the Incas
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
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What will be the legacy of Go?
In October this year I had the privilege of speaking at the GothamGo conference in New York City. As I talk quite softly, and there were a few problems with the recording, I decided to write up my slide notes and present them here.
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Turing awardees republished key methods and ideas without credit
Whose Creators They Failed to Credit
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Old tech is haunted
We're making scientists and ghost-hunters kiss
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Carl Sagan, nuking the moon, and not nuking the moon
Most of us go about our lives comforted by the thought “I would never drop a nuclear weapon on the moon.” The truth is that given a lot of power, a nuclear weapon, and a lot of extremely specific c…
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Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
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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.
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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…
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The Connection Machines CM-1 and CM-2 (2015)
Thirty years after its launch in 1987, a CM-2 was acquired by MoMA NY. It is only on display in selected shows - its inaugural exhibit was in " Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959-1989"
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Notes on Red Star OS 3.0
How to navigate North Korea's home-grown Linux distribution.
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The Construction of a Yurt (1995)
[ed note: this article is also available in pdf and postscript and as a Microsoft Word document . ]
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The outside investigation of SoftRAM 95 (2021)
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research
I gave a brief talk last night at the Mozilla Research Party (first of a series), which happened to fall on the virtual (public, post-Easter-holiday) celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary .