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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
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Gurus of 90s Web Design: Zeldman, Siegel, Nielsen
With the rise of Flash and CSS in 1997, three web design philosophies emerge. David Siegel advocates for 'hacks', Jakob Nielsen keeps it simple, while Jeffrey Zeldman combines flair with usability.
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More than you wanted to know about how Game Boy cartridges work
I set out a while ago to make a Game Boy cartridge from scratch. This is not a novel goal; bootleg Game Boy cartridges have existed almost as long as the Game Boy itself has, and there are many third-party cartridges now available for purchase , or that have copyleft designs .
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When you opened a screen shot of a video in Paint, the video was playing in it
You copied the green screen.
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Old Soviet Venus descent craft nearing Earth reentry
That soon-to-reenter Cosmos 482 is getting increased attention by satellite trackers – and new imagery provides some interesting details.
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Celebrating 20 Years of MDN
MDN turns 20! Let's look at how we started, how MDN became the most trusted resource for web developers, the impact it's had on the open web, and yes, there's cake, too.
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Finding a 27-year-old easter egg in the Power Mac G3 ROM
I was recently poking around inside the original Power Macintosh G3’s ROM and accidentally discovered an easter egg that nobody has documented until now.
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The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils (2022)
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at
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A note on the USB-to-PS/2 mouse adapter that came with Microsoft mouse devices
It's a purely mechanical adapter that relies on smarts in the mouse itself.
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Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
Wherein we figure out how to land on the stupid aircraft carrier in Top Gun
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The Video Game History Foundation library opens in early access
For free. For everyone. Wherever you are.
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1910: The year the modern world lost its mind
What one of my favorite history books about my favorite historical period—turn-of-the-century American—tells us about technology, anxiety, and human nature
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Twenty Eighth International Obfuscated C Code Contest
IOCCC Year 2024
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Why English doesn't use accents
And why French is full of them
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2025 was awarded jointly to Mary E. Brunkow, Frederick J. Ramsdell and Shimon Sakaguchi "for their discoveries concerning peripheral immune tolerance"
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The day Return became Enter (2023)
A deep dive into the convoluted and fascinating story of one of the most important keys on the keyboard
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8-bit Boléro
I hope you'll enjoy the video as much as I enjoyed making it! There are many little details that I'll let you discover on your own.
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Why Bell Labs Worked
Or, how MBA culture killed Bell Labs
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Life, work, death and the peasant: Rent and extraction
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
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Athlon 64: How AMD turned the tables on Intel
Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get
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Hunt for Red October 1990 (2016)
Visual Effects Supervisor - Scott Squires Visual Effects Director of Photography - Patrick Sweeney The effects for this movie were orig...
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The QNX Operating System
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2025 was awarded jointly to Susumu Kitagawa, Richard Robson and Omar M. Yaghi "for the development of metal–organic frameworks"
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The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh
The rise and fall of yogh
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How RSS beat Microsoft
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
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