631
Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
632
The decline of deviance
Where has all the weirdness gone?
633
Tunnel Boring Machines (2018)
Meet the Most Interesting Tunnel Boring Machines
634
'Be' is nice, end of story
pick a name from the dictionary, it can work
635
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…
636
How We Nearly Lost the Discovery Shuttle
Now that Discovery is safely delivered to the Smithsonian, I think I can tell the story of how we nearly lost her in July of 2005, and how well-intentioned, highly motivated, hard-working, smart p…
637
2020 Leap Day Bugs
The following is a list of many bugs caught on or near leap day, February 29th, 2020. Each link below references the issue with supporting details where available.
638
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…
639
Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
The original Roman mile was 1000 paces (milia passuum), or 5000 feet. The modern mile was defined as 5280 feet under Queen Elizabeth at the end of the 16th century in order to reconcile multiple di…
640
U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained (2013)
U.S. Army Camouflage Improvement Explained by Guy Cramer, President/CEO of HyperStealth Biotechnology Corp.
641
A Mind Is Born (2017)
Making a demo in just 256 bytes would be a formidable challenge regardless of platform. A Mind Is Born is my attempt to do it on the Commodore 64. In the absence of an actual 256-byte compo, it was submitted to the Oldskool 4K Intro compo at Revision 2017 , where it ended up on 1st place.
642
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…
643
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
644
645
Heroes of Might and Magic
The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy…
646
647
John Bradley, author of xv, has died
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
648
Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
649
650
Some killjoys have removed the blink tag from Firefox
Some killjoys have removed the <blink> tag from Firefox. Dropped blink effect from text-decoration: blink; and completely removed <blink> element. Of course, <blink> still works on my sites. And with proper MILSPEC 3 units on, 1 unit off timing, as is right and proper, and which I believe the non-Unix versions of…
651
Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
652
SkyMall's SkyFall
How does the business of SkyMall work? And what is the dark secret behind the recent merger of SkyMall and Xhibit.
653
Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
654
Programmers At Work: Bill Gates (1986)
As chief executive officer of Microsoft, William H. (Bill) Gates is considered one of the driving forces behind today’s personal computing and office automation industry. Gates started his ca…
655
656
Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
657
658
Lisping at JPL (2002)
This is the story of the rise and fall of Lisp at the Jet Propulsion Lab as told from my personal (and highly biased) point of view. I am not writing in my official capacity as an employee of JPL, nor am I in any way representing the official position of JPL. (This will become rather obvious shortly.)
659
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
660
Reverse engineering software licensing from early-2000s abandonware
This series concerns a software licensing system used in a proprietary software application from circa 2004. The software was available in an unregistered trial mode with limited functionality. A free licence could be obtained by registering online with the software vendor. The software became abandonware circa 2009…