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Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 202 posts.
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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...
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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…
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HyperCard On The Archive
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
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Fixing bugs like it's 1988
I grew up in the 80's, the decade home computers went from curiosity to mainstream. In primary school we had several Philips P2000T home com...
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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer
If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
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A Brief History of the UUID
Discover the evolution of UUIDs. Explore cloud communication trends, customer stories, and tips for scalable apps with Twilio's APIs. Learn more now!
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Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code
When it was released back in 1993, Disney’s Aladdin for the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive, depending on which side of the pond you lived on through the early 90’s) was really a visually striking game. Powered by what eventually became known as “Digicel” technology, along with a solid selection of middleware and some…
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Languages Which Almost Became CSS
When Tim Berners-Lee announced HTML in 1991 there was no method of styling pages. How a given HTML tag was rendered was determined by the browser, often with significant input from the user’s preferences
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Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated
[press: boingboing] The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane…
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A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
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How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
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Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984. While there are certainly…
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Bjarne Stroustrup Awarded 2017 Faraday Medal
For significant contributions to the history of computing, in particular pioneering the C++ programming language, Bjarne Stroustrup has been named … <a href="https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2017/bjarne-stroustrup-awarded-2017-faraday-medal/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Bjarne…
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Happy 15th Birthday .NET
Today marks the 15th anniversary since .NET debuted to the world. On February 13th, 2002, the first version of .NET was released as part of Visual Studio.NET. It seems just like yesterday when Microsoft was building its “Next Generation Windows Services” and unleashed a new level of productivity with Visual…
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Ultima VI
After Richard Garriott and his colleagues at Origin Systems finished each Ultima game — after the manic final crunch of polishing and testing, after the release party, after the triumphant show appearances and interviews in full Lord British regalia — there must always arise the daunting question of what to do next…
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Motive.c: The Soul of the Sims (1997)
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
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Can I Talk to that William Fellow? He was so Helpful (2009)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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What's the difference between the com and exe extensions? (2008)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
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The Craft of Text Editing (1999)
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
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Reviving the Apple 410 Color Plotter
After seeing some of the jaw-dropping and inspiring plotter art that's been popping up on #plottertwitter this year, I decided to get in on the fun. We don't