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8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 153 posts.
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The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2014 was awarded jointly to Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura "for the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources"
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Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any …
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New York City photographed with the Game Boy Camera in 2000
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
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Who smeared Richard Feynman?
Richard Feynman's FBI file contains one very pointed, personal, anonymous attack. But can we figure out who wrote it from the context?
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Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
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Surfing the Modern Web with Ancient Browsers
I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem – the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to…
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A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once
Even today, plenty of disinformation still abounds regarding the WIZ code. A 22.050Khz wobble that was used to identify legitimate CD's. Maybe one day we'll put them to rest... :)
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First Atomic Clock Wristwatch
Do not be misled. The many "atomic time" wristwatches you see on the market today are merely cheap quartz wristwatches with a built-in radio receiver. The watch sets itself from 60 kHz VLF radio time signals transmitted by NIST from station WWVB near the US atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. At least once a day…
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How A Lawsuit Over Hot Coffee Helped Erode the 7th Amendment
In 1992, a woman sued McDonald's because her coffee was too hot. It's considered a prime example of a greedy lawsuit. But the truth is much more complicated.
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Hello from 1978
We rescued two PDP-11/34 computers and their associated equipment from a storage unit in the Bronx and have been working on getting them running again. The
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A scientist stole my root beer
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
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160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
I rarely re-blog, but this one deserves being spread far and wide. Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records Please read the whole post included above – but the …
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Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
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The Woman Behind Apple's First Icons
In the early 80s, Susan Kare was a pixel art pioneer at Apple. Today, she continues to dazzle.
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How to buy a tank: a BRDM-2 story
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
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How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors
By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
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Slackware is 21 Years Old
A blog about Slackware Linux
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What Happened at NewsGator
I sat in the back of the bus the whole time and I don’t really know all the details. But here are the parts that I know about.