3991
Bill Gates sums up Microsoft's abusive history
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
3992
Has Apple sounded the last POST?
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
3993
Repairing a tiny ribbon cable inside a 28 year old IBM ThinkPad 701c
I'm in the middle of turning two badly treated IBM ThinkPad 701CS machines (the ones with the lovely unfolding keyboard) into a single, wor...
3994
3995
Examining Windows 1.0 Hello.c
For those who’ve been long-time readers of SoylentNews, it’s not exactly a secret that I have a personal interest in retro computing and documenting the history and evolution of the Personal Computer. About three years ago, I ran a series of articles about restoring Xenix 2.2.3c, and I’m far overdue on writing a new…
3996
A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 35th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
3997
3998
Cash, Canadians and CPUs: Intel's 'Lost' Early Microprocessor
The story of Microsystems International and the Intel 4005
3999
The History of DR DOS
The last of Digital Research
4000
The Logistics of Road War in the Wasteland
This week, we’re doing another ‘silly’ topic, but this being me, it is a silly logistics topic, because – as the saying goes – amateurs talk tactics, professionals tal…
4001
The curious case of the Unix workstation layout
Cathode Ray Dude recently did an excellent video about the history of the PC case, particularly the early- and mid-1990s, and the various mainboard layouts that pre-date the ATX standard. You should watch it. Here it is.
4002
Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client ...
4003
4004
Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)
Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming
4005
Interesting features of John Harrison's sea clocks
I recently got to see John Harrison's sea clocks at the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. I recommend visiting if you get the chance. This post is about some of the interesting things I observed.
4006
The Secret History of ATAPI
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
4007
4008
Quest for Glory III and IV
The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I . By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.
4009
The Invention of Sliced Bread
Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.
4010
Hacking the Yamaha DX9 to Turn It into a DX7 (2023)
A brief account of hacking the Yamaha DX9's firmware ROM to make its functionality more closely match the DX7.
4011
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...
4012
In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to…
4013
The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
4014
The Birth of Chipzilla
Or, the early history of Intel Corporation
4015
New RAM card, prototype Mac Portable, demo System 7
I guess this is a review of sorts, so here's the review part: you should buy Tech by Androda's new 7MB Macintosh Portable RAM card . On my D...
4016
30 years of Brainfuck
Has nerd sniping gone too far?
4017
4018
Ed Balls Day
Ed Balls Day is a bit of fun and the stuff of nonsense. It celebrates and remembers the day (28 April 2011) when British politician Ed Balls tweeted his name thinking he was entering it into a sear…
4019
The Oh My God Particle
The Oh-My-God Particle
4020
Why is there ancient Greek text on Afghan banknotes?
This, as I probably don’t need to tell you, is a banknote. To be specific, it’s a 10-afghani banknote printed in 2004 (my thanks to Dr Amelia Dowler of the BM for that astonishingly pre…