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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 143 posts.
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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“WarGames” Magazine Identified
As per Jargon File [1] definition number seven of Hacker [2] : "7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.", I have performed a real world hack of the movie "WarGames [3] [4] ." Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other…
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Remember when people tracked bugs?
I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…
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Bradley Manning’s Statement
Yesterday Bradley explained how and more importantly, why, he shared classified documents with WikiLeaks. Rush transcript by Alexa O'Brien.
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
Writing and photos by Brennan Moore
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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
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JSTOR Statement on Aaron Swartz
We are deeply saddened to hear the news about Aaron Swartz. We extend our heartfelt condolences to Aaron’s family, friends, and everyone who loved, knew, and admired him. He was a truly gifted person who made important contributions to the development of the internet and the web from which we all benefit.
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Aaron Swartz really did co-author RSS spec at age 14
In a discussion about journalism on venture capitalist Fred Wilson's blog, Dave Winer writes: ... professionals make plenty of these kinds of mistakes. For example last week the esteemed NY Times said RSS was software and that it was co-written by a 14-year old on a mail list. It is neither of those things. They never…
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A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
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Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped
Chris Hayes of MSNBC reminds us that the good guys and bad guys of history are not entirely clear as they're happening. Heather Parton of digsby blog passes along a transcript of his recent...
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Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
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Two Letters from Steve Jobs
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard insi…
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The 7-bit Internet
When I first started digging into the bowels of the Internet, I was fascinated by how many of its protocols—like HTTP and SMTP, for example—were entirely text based.
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Temperature chart for the last 11,000 years
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
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Oh, My Hand: Complaints Medieval Monks Scribbled in the Margins of Manuscripts
“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
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Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
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Perl is 26 Today
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
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Edward Tufte’s defense of Aaron Swartz and the “marvelously different”
Data visualization pioneer Edward Tufte relates how he came to defend Aaron Swartz in the JSTOR incident and how he, Tufte, was a hacker himself.
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Ten years of PyPy
From a software engineering perspective, 10 years is indistinguishable from infinity, so I don't care what happens 10 years from now -- as...