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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Old jokes
That’s what she said, a rabbi resolves a dispute, and six categories in the Philogelos
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Did insurance fire brigades let uninsured buildings burn?
This paper derives from a short, time-bound, review of the literature, which sought to investigate the question “Did Insurance Fire Brigades let uninsured buildings burn?”. The question is set in the context of property fire insurance in London, from 1680. The situation was possibly comparable with other large British…
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A bug fix in the 8086 microprocessor, revealed in the die's silicon
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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I assure you, medieval people bathed (2019)
I can’t believe I have to write this down right now, but my dear friends, medieval people bathed regularly. Yes. I assure you. I am very serious. It is true. In fact, medieval people loved a bath a…
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Ten Years of ThinkPadding
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
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The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)
A short history of the data structure that powered the classic first-person shooter.
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GIMP Turns 27
Happy 27th birthday to the GNU Image Manipulation Program
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The weird Hewlett Packard FreeDOS option
In this installment: some strange things I discovered when purchasing a FreeDOS laptop from Hewlett Packard. I suspect that the audience for this will be somewhat limited but I had fun exploring this. Perhaps you, dear reader, will find a chuckle in here too.
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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…
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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.
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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...
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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...
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Emulating an iPod Touch 1G and iPhoneOS 1.0 using QEMU (Part I)
My personal website.
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How Dwarf Fortress is built
Dwarf Fortress is one of those oddball passion projects that’s broken into Internet consciousness. It’s a free game where you play either an adventurer or a fortress full of dwarves in a randomly generated fantasy world. The simulation runs deep, with new games creating multiple civilizations with histories…
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“News is what somebody does not want you to print – all the rest is advertising”
George Orwell? Alfred Harmsworth? William Randolph Hearst? L. E. Edwardson? Robert W. Sawyer? Mark Rhea Byers? Brian R. Roberts? Malcolm Muggeridge? Katharine Graham? Lord Rothermere? Lord Northcliffe? Anonymous?
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How the weak can win – A primer on protracted war
Thanks to our volunteer narrator, this post is now available in audio format. This week, in an effort to fill in some of the theoretical basis for thinking about how weaker powers think about fight…
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Europe's now-drowned 'lost world' and the 25m-high tsunami that finished it off
The ultimate Trip To The Seaside Where Everything Went Wrong.
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'Be' is nice, end of story
pick a name from the dictionary, it can work
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How Pitfall builds its world (2021)
Games for the Atari 2600 were quite constrained. When Warren Robinett first pitched the idea that would become Adventure , a game where you would explore a world with many rooms and pick up items to help you along the way, he was denied because it wasn't thought feasible. And it made sense to do so. This was the late…
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U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)
U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained by Guy Cramer, President/CEO of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp.
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Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
Part I of Why hasn't Middle Earth had an Industrial Revolution?
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The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
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50th Anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (2018)
I was asked to give a toast in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of [The Mother of All Demos](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos) so I spent some time reflecting on Engelbart's w...
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Origin of the Bluetooth Name
About Us We all recognize the “Bluetooth” brand, but we take for granted its significance and how much it impacts our lives. From smartphones to headphones and beyond, we rely on Bluetooth technology…