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The Invention of the AeroPress
How one inventor went from making Frisbees to one of the world's best coffeemakers.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Stanford historian uncovers a grim correlation between violence and inequality
Professor Walter Scheidel examines the history of peace and economic inequality over the past 10,000 years.
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Freshmeat.net, 1997-2014
A former coworker pointed me to the news today that freshmeat has suddenly ceased operations. I spent the rest of the day flooded with memories and the urge to jot a few of them down before they’re…
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The PS2’s backwards compatibility from the engineer who built it (2020)
As the PS2 turns 20 in Japan, a look back on its PS1 backwards compatibility from the eyes of the former Sony engineer responsible for it.
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Wii U Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Microsoft Word for Windows Version 1.1a Source Code (2014)
The dominant word processing program for personal computers in the 1980s was DOS-based WordPerfect. Microsoft Word for DOS, which had been released in 1983, was an also-ran.
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On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
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1977: Zork
When four MIT hackers decide they can make a better Adventure, they start building a game that will still be topping bestseller charts eight years later.
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Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for m...
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The lost Van Jacobson paper that could save the Internet
One of my heroes has always been Van Jacobson. His 1988 paper on solving TCP congestion is an enjoyable read, with cross-discipline appeal. The history of all this is fascinating, such as congestio…
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The vi family
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
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Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)
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1970s mainframe RPGs we can no longer play
A blog in which a dedicated addict plays through all PC computer role-playing games (CRPGs), in chronological order.
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CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
Guest Post Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I ...
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Infinite Mac OS X
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X , with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that…
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80386 microcode disassembled
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.
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Remember when people tracked bugs?
I've done some well-known bitching about the halfassed and haphazard way that Open Sores projects have handled their bugs in the past, but man, things have only gotten worse since then. I mean, projects used to actually have bug databases. Boy, those were the days. Failing that, developers used to put their email…
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When Lobbying was Illegal
Although lobbyists' influence seems inevitable, in the 1800s, several states banned lobbying outright.
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Bradley Manning’s Statement
Yesterday Bradley explained how and more importantly, why, he shared classified documents with WikiLeaks. Rush transcript by Alexa O'Brien.
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The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
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Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14M (2016)
Thanks for stopping by 👋🏾 Why not check out our file conversion API – convert 100s of different file formats in just one line of code (we even support PowerPoint files!) This is part one of a series of… Read More Deal of the century? How Microsoft beat Apple to buy PowerPoint for $14 million