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How I built the IMDb message boards, in 2001
Update: My erstwhile colleague Mathias wrote up his thoughts about his role in this story
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)
American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
753
DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
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The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
755
2006: Dwarf Fortress
The text of Dwarf Fortress and procedural tales so expansive no human could ever explore them all.
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MQTT turns 25
October 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of MQTT, a crucial protocol for connecting devices in diverse environments. With origins in lightweight networks, MQTT has flourished, empowering countless a…
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1800s Astronomical Drawings vs. NASA Images (2016)
Comparing astrological drawings from our Digital Collections to NASA images—how similar do you think they are?
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Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
760
“Computer science is not about computers”
Edsger W. Dijkstra? Alan Perlis? Jacques Arsac? George Johnson? Donald Knuth? Matthew Dennis Haines? Anonymous?
761
William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
762
What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
763
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
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Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?
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The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
Today, @vickschutz and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977); it’s totally right there but we never grasped it. — Todd Vaziri (...
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Yamaha DX7 Technical Analysis
An introductory technical analysis of the Yamaha DX7, detailing some of the known information about the synthesiser’s engineering.
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Four strange places to see London's Roman Wall
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770
“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders
Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are flat “billboarded” stock images of food? This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has per...
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London tube map made from a working circuit board
Fancy a tube map with a difference? How about one made from a circuit board - with lights that show live train movements?
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The Embroidered Computer
The Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2018? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1961 The books Catch-22, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Phantom Tollbooth, the films Breakfast at Tiffany’s and West Side Story, and more. . . Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after…
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The End of Sierra as We Knew It, Part 1: The Acquisition
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
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Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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America Had an Atomic Mecha Warrior Robot
"REAL stories. REAL history."
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Secretly Public Domain: Most books published in the US before 1964
This is how Project Gutenberg is able to publish all these science fiction stories from the 50s and 60s . Those stories were published in issues of magazines that didn't send in the renewal form. But up til now this hasn't been a big factor, because 1) the big publishers generally made sure to send in their renewals…
779
Sega Channel: VGHF Recovers over 100 Sega Channel ROMs (and More)
Our project to preserve the history of Sega Channel — including over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs.
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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.