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The THX Sound
The essential, funny guide to retro and future synths, guitars, music making, gear, gadgets and techology.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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D&D is Anti-Medieval
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
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20 years of Git
Twenty years ago, Git was born. How did this unlikely "information manager" take over the world?
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Mac Chimes of Death
We’re all familiar with the Mac’s startup chime. While it has changed over the years, it has greeted users with its friendly tone for decades. What you may not know is that for years, the Mac also came with a death sound, that would play when the machine was unable to properly boot. And they are glorious: Macintosh II…
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Recovering “lost” treasure-filled floppy discs with an oscilloscope
There are many good, modern solutions for reading data off old floppy discs and drives. Perhaps the best is the Greaseweazle : it's capable,...
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Phrase origin: Why do we "call" functions?
On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…
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Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
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Dirty tricks 6502 programmers use
This post recaps some of the C64 coding tricks used in my little Commodore 64 coding competition . The competition rules were simple: make a C64 executable (PRG) that draws two lines to form the below image. The objective was to do this in as few bytes as possible.
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Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
A blog about software craft and quality
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A Brief History of the UUID
Discover the evolution of UUIDs. Explore cloud communication trends, customer stories, and tips for scalable apps with Twilio's APIs. Learn more now!
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An invalid 68030 instruction accidentally allowed the Mac Classic II to boot
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
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How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 was awarded jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
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Microsoft completes GitHub acquisition
With the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub complete, Nat Friedman joins as CEO.
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Reversing Sinclair's amazing 1974 calculator hack - half the ROM of the HP-35
Register-level simulator of the Sinclair Scientific calculator
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Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code
When it was released back in 1993, Disney’s Aladdin for the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive, depending on which side of the pond you lived on through the early 90’s) was really a visually striking game. Powered by what eventually became known as “Digicel” technology, along with a solid selection of middleware and some…
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NES graphics – Part 1
Released in 1983, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) home console was a cheap, yet capable machine that went on to achieve tremendous success. Using a custom designed Picture Processing Unit (PPU) for graphics, the system could produce visuals that were quite impressive at the time, and still hold up fairly well…
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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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When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
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Nintendo Network shutdown – The beginning of the end
Information regarding Nintendo's rollout of the Nintendo Network shutdown
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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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