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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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Is the Living Computer Museum dead?
PCjs offers a variety of online machine emulators written in JavaScript. Run DOS, Windows, OS/2 and other vintage PC applications in a web browser on your desktop computer, iPhone, or iPad. An assortment of microcomputers, minicomputers, terminals, programmable calculators, and arcade machines are also available…
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Twenty-five years of curl
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…
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"Hacker News" for retro computing and gaming
I noticed over time that I was drawn to the retro computing or gaming posts on Hacker News . So, I've set up a dedicated web site in the sam...
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The strangest computer manual ever written
It's dark and funny and unlike anything else
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Netscape Meteors
I went on a small journey the last couple days to find the original Netscape Navigator “meteors” animation. This one has a special place in my head and heart because it is so clearly connected to my memories of discovering the web as a kid. Here it is in its original 60×60 px glory:
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Pipe Dreams: The life and times of Yahoo Pipes
In 2007, a small team at Yahoo! briefly changed how we program the internet. This is their story.
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Lisa Source Code Release
CHM publicly releases the source code to Apple's Lisa computer, including its system and applications software.
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Things Every Hacker Once Knew (2017)
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
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When did people stop being drunk all the time?
Trends in alcohol consumption from the middle ages to the modern world tell a story.
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Mickey, Disney, and the public domain: A 95-year love triangle
Mickey, Disney, and the Public Domain: a 95-year Love Triangle by Jennifer Jenkins, Director, Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain On January 1, 2024, after almost a century of copyright protection, Mickey Mouse, or at least a version of Mickey Mouse, will enter the United States public domain. The first…
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How transportation technologies shaped empires
For thousands of years, a hidden rule limited the size of empires, unbeknownst to their rulers.
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Cray-1 vs Raspberry Pi
Cray 1 Supercomputer Performance Comparisons With Home Computers Phones and Tablets
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The story of titanium
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
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Wireshark Is 25: The email that started it all and lessons learned along the way
25 years ago, I sent this email, which ended up changing the course of my life From: Gerald Combs - Unicom Communications <gerald [at] … > To: gtk-list [at] redhat . com Subject: ANNOUNCE: Ethereal 0.2.0 Date: Tue, 14 Jul 1998 21:47:01 -0500 (CDT) Ethereal is a network analyzer that lets you capture and interactively…
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Nintendo 3DS Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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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…
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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 →
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The Door Close Button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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My dad built a cool thing but never boasted about it
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
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Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty
It’s 1986 and you’ve got a 31 tons of copper, in the form of a giant 46 meter tall statue, that’s looking a bit worse for wear.
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Calculators now emulated at Internet Archive
It's time to add another family of emulated older technology to the Internet Archive.The vast majority of platforms within what we call The Emularity happens because of the work of MAME Team, which has spent over 25 years adding support for tens of thousands of machines, platforms, and tools to their breathtaking…
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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
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