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FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Oldest domains in the .com, .net, and .org TLDs
Oldest registered domain names in the .com, .net, and .org top-level domains
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Quote Origin: I had exactly four seconds and Google had told me it wasn’t enough
Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred…
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Uncovered Euripides fragments are 'kind of a big deal'
CU Boulder Classics scholars identify previously unknown fragments of two lost tragedies by Greek tragedian Euripides.
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The History of the URL
January 11th, 1982, 22 computer scientists met to discuss an issue with ‘computer mail’ (now known as email).
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Debugging a Live Saturn V
Writing and photos by Brennan Moore
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A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll
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Einstein went to his office just so he could walk home with Gödel
Albert Einstein used to say that he went to his office at the Institute for Advanced Study “just to have the privilege of walking home with Kurt Gödel.” The two would meet at Einstein’s home each day between 10 and 11 and undertake the half-hour walk to the institute. At 1 or 2 in the afternoon they’d walk back…
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ArVid: Russians squeezed 4 hard drives into one VHS tape in the 90s
It’s a hellish time: prices for basic consumer goods are tripl e what they were last year. Your employer just paid your salary in eggs instead of money. There are daily shootouts between rival gangs. 🎵 Your love life’s DOA… 🎵
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A woman named "Steve" – IT pioneer, entrepreneur, philanthropist (2019)
Among computing pioneers, Dame Stephanie "Steve" Shirley is one of the most celebrated for building a $3 billion empire in the 1960s with an all-female staff.
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Celebrating 40 years of ZX Spectrum
The ZX Spectrum celebrates its 40 years anniversary today. Read more about how the community is still active - creating new content, archiving old content, and hacking on all sorts of hardware.
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The Document Which Was Formerly Called The MIT Guide to Lockpicking
Which is too bad in a way. I thought it was a cool piece of urban folklore no matter where it came from, and it contributed to giving college students everywhere a reputation for healthy rebeliousness.
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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The Last POWER1 CPU on Mars Is Dead
The Opportunity Rover , also known as the Mars Exploration Rover B (or MER-1), has finally been declared at end of mission today after 5,3...
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Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2023 was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier "for experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter"
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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“The Mill” – It just might Work
The Mill is a new general-purpose high-performance processor design from out-of-the-box computing ( http://ootbcomp.com/ ). They claim to beat typical high-end out-of-order (OOO) designs like the Intel Haswell generation by crazy factors, such as being 2.3x faster while using 2.3x less power compared to a Haswell. All…
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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
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What the hell is Forth? (2019)
Forth is perhaps the tiniest possible useful interactive programming language. It is tiny along a number of dimensions: The amount of c...
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Xbox 360 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Early Macintosh Emulation Comes to the Archive
After offering in-browser emulation of console games, arcade machines, and a range of other home computers, the Internet Archive can now emulate the early models of the Apple Macintosh, the black-and-white, mouse driven computer that radically shifted the future of home computing in 1984. While there are certainly…
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Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
The original Snowboard Kids has been fully decompiled in only 84 days! In this post I delve into what changed and what lessons might apply to future projects.
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The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
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Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
A 13-year-old on a walk in the Spandau district of Berlin discovered a rare ancient bronze coin from Troy . It dates to between 281 and 261 B.C. and was issued by the mint at Ilion (Classical and Hellenistic era Troy). Now on display at the PETRI Museum, it is the first Greek antiquity ever discovered inside the city…
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Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
Gnutella Explanation