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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 155 posts.
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MAME and the New Emulation Reality
I’m sorry all my weblog entries seem to be variations of emulation, Internet Archive, Archive Team and Vintage Computing, but that’s kind of all my life is right now anyway. (I’m …
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Unix is not an acceptable Unix
The Unix command line is full of surprises. For instance: did you know that the OS X version of the ls tool, most frequently used to get a list of the files in the current working directory, recognizes no fewer than 38 different flags?
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Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorith...
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Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)
One of my colleagues is ex Bloomberg. He tells me there's only one thing I need to know about them: "25 million lines of Fortran !" Apparently they have 1500 coders firefightin…
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What doomed MakerBot? The Osborne effect
On April 17, MakerBot laid off 20% of its staff . That's a big deal to me as I've been wondering what happened to the MakerBot I used to admire . Years ago, I looked up to the MakerBot team as a role model of how to run an open hardware company. Bre Pettis, MakerBot co-founder and former CEO, had given many talks and…
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80x40
The git repo as art.
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Whatever happened to Channel 1?
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
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Haskell and floppy disks in Norwegian government
Update December 2015: This project has now ended and the floppy era is over - for me at least. The project has been featured quite a bit in the press and blogosphere. Most notably: BBC World Service (14min12sek in) CBC Spark Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK) Dagbladet (national newspaper) While mass production of…
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Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists and CIA devised torture program
How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.
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Prepping for the Transfer of 25,000 Manuals
A day after my previous post, and things have been happening. SHORT TERM: First, I asked for people to send money if they couldn’t help any other way, and people have. This took away any conc…
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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
Studies showed early on that kids who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs. Why did schools keep using it?
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The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers (2011)
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
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Slashdot Burying Stories About SlashdotMedia Owned SourceForge
If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a…
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube
Yesterday, the web celebrated its 25th birthday and to join in, I have a little story. A couple of years ago I found a NeXTcube. I'm not going to say where it is to avoid vandalism (the computer is publicly accessible under some circumstances without much oversight), but this is the story. Sir Tim Berners-Lee…
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The Man Behind the Curtain: Commercial games with source code releases
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
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K&R C (2014)
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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The origins of chroot()
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Dirt in Medieval Books
When you use something for a thousand years, it is bound to get dirty. Medieval books often show stains and marks on their pages, usually from readers who did not always take very good care of the …
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Stop Misquoting Donald Knuth
DISCLAIMER: The following are my own personal opinions and are not shared, sanctioned or endorsed by anybody in particular, especially my employer. Any criticisms expressed herein are of a general nature and are neither inspired by nor directed at any person, entity, or product in particular. Links to other online…
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Why We Hurt Each Other: Tolstoy’s Letters to Gandhi
“Love is the only way to rescue humanity from all ills.”