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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 233 posts.
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Instant stone (just add water) (2018)
If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!
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Moscow Publishes Photocopies of Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Secret Protocols
Paul Goble Staunton, June 1 – For the first time, a Moscow portal, Istoricheskaya pamyat , has published photocopies of th...
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When Pepsi Had a Navy
In 1989, just before the collapse of the USSR, the Pepsi Company cut a deal with Soviet Premiere Mikhail Gorbachev that left it with a fleet of Russian military ships, making PepsiCo temporarily th…
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IBM and the Holocaust (2017)
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
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Thaddeus Kosciusko
So, we know all about the heroes of the American Revolution, right? George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere – OK, well, not him, he was a good silversmith, an average errand rider, and a godawfu…
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Buying an IBM Mainframe
I bought an IBM mainframe for personal use. I am doing this for learning and figuring out how it works. If you are curious about what goes i...
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Polish general who fought with Washington may have been female
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 1777. At the end of a daylong battle, George Washington’s right flank has completely collapsed. British troops are closing in. A dashing Polish cavalry officer reports to Washington’s bodyguard that they are in danger of being surrounded. Washington orders Casimir Pulaski to gather as many…
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The IBM Pentium 4 64-Bit CPU
This time we will talk about one unique Intel processor, which did not appear on the retail market and whose reviews you will not find on the Internet. This processor was produced purely by special order for one well-known manufacturer of computer equipment. Also in the framework of this article I will try to assemble…
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Why Hypercard Had to Die (2011)
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
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Debian 10.2
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
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Things to Know About GNU Readline
What is GNU Readline and where did it come from?
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80x25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
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What is ZIL anyway?
The Infocom ZIL code dump has kicked off a small whirlwind of news articles and blog posts. A lot of them are somewhat hazy on what ZIL is, and how it relates to MDL, Lisp, Z-code, Inform, and the rest of the Golden-Age IF ecosystem. So I'm ...
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Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2019 was awarded "for contributions to our understanding of the evolution of the universe and Earth’s place in the cosmos" with one half to James Peebles "for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology", the other half jointly to Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz "for the discovery of an…
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An old artifact kept in a vault outside Paris is no longer the standard kilogram
The international standard measurement of the kilogram is being officially changed on May 20, for the first time making all standard units defined in terms of basic physical principles instead of particular human-made objects. MIT professor and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Ketterle explains the change.
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Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
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Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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This TRS-80
A first-hand story about the TRS-80 Model 100 and journalism
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TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
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