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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
In my view, wget is not a curl competitor. It is a companion tool that has a feature overlap with curl. Use the tool that does the job. Getting the job done is the key. If that means using wget instead of curl, then that is good and I don't mind. Why would I? To … Continue reading The curl-wget Venn diagram →
We’ve spoken about arcade Tron a few times here on the blog over the years. Specifically, I shared some development documents a few months back here. For those of you that don’t know, T…
I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. So I've recreated some of that old web magic, in modern HTML, CSS and JS.
But these browsers have one great feature: They give a very good indication whether a page is worth reading. If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content, either (In a few cases I looked up the page with something more advanced (e.g., Arena), and I was always…
The humble Suica card was developed in the 90’s and has kept Japan moving for almost three decades. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
Imagining a childhood encounter with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
The history of Vi & Vim goes hand in hand with the history of open-source software. This article looks at the historical events that shaped the evolution of these text editors.
Exclusive video footage of Steve Jobs talking about his design vision and philosophy and how design worked at Apple.
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
We had no idea how close we came to being crushed.
Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64 has reached 100% matching decompilation. A brief note on what that means, how we got here, and what comes next.
Back in 1999, a group of developers lead by Jorge Arellano Cid forked the Gzilla/Armadillo code originally developed by Raph Levien, and began working on what is now known as the Dillo web browser.
I recently compiled a list of Perlis Languages that were meant to illustrate varying paradigms not typically found in mainstream programming languages. Those languages were meant to stretch your mind and are not necessarily representative of the state of the art in language design and implementation. In this post I…
We help the daring build legendary companies from idea to IPO and beyond.
Or, how we lose knowledge and technologies. And what we can do about it.
The 80386 is the most important CPU Intel ever produced. It confirmed the importance of the x86 line and sparked a computing revolution. And yet it almost never saw the light of day. This is the history of the 386 and why it was such a landmark.
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
Notes on Chapter 1 of Principia Mathematica
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
A deep dive on the early days of creative computing coming to life. Punch cards, plotters, light pens and lots more.
What can a 45-year-old mission to the Moon tell us about a
This week, as an addendum to our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, we’re going to look at two alternative regional processes, where th…
