511
Nintendo 3DS Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
512
513
514
Apple bought out all of Newsweek's 1984 Election issue ad space for Mac
Home | Polski > Computer history > Advertisements > International > Apple Computer > Macintosh Newsweek advertisement Go back | Previous | Next Apple bought all of the advertising space in November/December special election issue of Newsweek in 1984, and devoted it all to Macintosh. Below you can see all 39 pages of…
515
Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
516
517
27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
518
519
The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
520
521
It Can Be Done (2003)
A story about quality from the development of the Multics operating system.
522
Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
523
Id Software Programming Principles
id Software co-founder John Romero tells the early story of the game company inthis GDC 2016 talk and lists the programming principles that guided them towar...
524
525
The games Nintendo didn't want you to play: Tengen
Recently, I took a look at Nintendo’s MMC line of mappers, and some other boards. All boards for the NES’ western releases had to be manufactured by Nintendo...
526
The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd
Introduction I've been on a bit of a floppy disc protection odyssey recently. This will probably be the last floppy disc related post for so...
527
528
Why does the New menu even exist for creating new empty files?
You have to open the file anyway to make it useful, so why not just open the program directly?
529
Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
530
531
Whence '\n'?
If you do just foo , the following justfile will write a single byte 0x0A to a file named bar:
532
Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP
Nothing in the news media yet, but many folks on Twitter and colleague Nassim Taleb are reporting that the father of fractal geometry is dead at age 85. We’re n
533
Some excerpts from recent Alan Kay emails
Most of the funding of research efforts I've been involved in since ARPA-Parc have been with various profit making companies -- Atari, Apple, Disney, HP, SAP, Infosys, etc. And there have been various kinds of compromises involved. And some good work on smaller scales did get done. Others of my colleagues in the…
534
535
Why Bell Labs Worked
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
536
They don't make them like that any more: the Yamaha DX7 keyboard
Nothing says ‘80s pop’ like a DX7.
537
The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
538
What made the NES so interesting?
I often like to cover oddities here; details of computers and arcade systems people may not have heard of, that didn’t sell well but had unique or interestin...
539
Nintendo releases original Zelda design docs
See the original The Legend of Zelda as you never have before…
540
What would it take to recreate Bell Labs?
For most of the 20th century, AT&T was almost entirely responsible for building and operating America’s telephone infrastructure.