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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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…
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
A story about data and a very foolish hobby
How to answer this question—and how not to
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.
In 1994, Origin Systems’s Ultima series was the most universally lauded franchise in computer gaming. Over the course of seven mainline games and five spinoffs and side stories, the Ultima brand had consistently stood for elaborate but doggedly nonlinear plots which seriously engaged with questions of ethics; for the…
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
INTRODUCTION Visa is one of the biggest companies in the world. Cards bearing the Visa logo are used more than 340 million times every day. And the Visa brand is one of the most-recognized on the planet. Yet unlike other companies of similar size and ubiquity, few people know what Visa does, how
The British Library project to digitise copies of newspapers from its archive is to release one million pages as a free resource.
This week, the Dow languishes near multi-decade lows and blue-chip stocks trade below book value.
ICQ is turning 20 (and that is no small potatoes). A whole generation has already grown up with the forerunner of all messengers. For this…
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?
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture. And then there’s me. I had the…
<a href="https://community.cadence.com/cadence_blogs_8/b/breakfast-bytes"></a>The title of this post, you are not expected to understand this, is one of the most famous comments ever. It is in the v6 version of Unix, the mother operating system of Linux, Android,and iOS. Unix was developed by Dennis Ritchie and Ken…
I found this strange looking device at Goodwill yesterday. Originally, owing perhaps to the bright blue color, I thought it was some sort of educational or kids device. It had no branding on it, so…
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"
As an enlightened, modern parent , I try to be as involved as possible in the lives of my six children. I encourage them to join team sports. I attend their teen parties with them to ensure no drinking or alcohol is on the premises. I keep a fatherly eye on the CDs they listen to and the shows they watch, the company…
Now, when we look back, we can pretty clearly see that the iPod was the genesis of a totally different kind of Apple — an Apple willing to enter new markets and make the best version of that new thing. Sure, Apple had made other things before ( QuickTake ! PowerCD !) but they never really felt committed to those…
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...
