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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
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London tube map made from a working circuit board
Fancy a tube map with a difference? How about one made from a circuit board - with lights that show live train movements?
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CGA in 1024 Colors – A New Mode: The Illustrated Guide (2015)
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Addendum: Crucible Steel and Cast Iron
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…
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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.
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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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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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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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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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Rescuing vintage arcade video games from an abandoned ship (2016)
Regular readers of this blog will have seen me reference “Arcade Raids” in previous articles. This might create images in your head of hooded gangs of arcade collectors breaking into warehouses in …
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Sega VR Revived: Emulating an Unreleased Genesis Accessory
We managed to virtualize Sega’s virtual reality headset without ever touching the hardware!
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part V: Ladders Are Chaos
This is the fifth part of a series taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers (1954) and Peter Jackson…
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Demoscene, the secret behind Finnish game industry
This is my story as a game developer. It is also a story of how the Finnish game industry came to be.
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Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you’ve never heard of (2014)
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
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Master of Orion
Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position…
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Retiring Internet Explorer
Prelude In late 2004, I was the Program Manager for Microsoft’s clipart website, delivering a million pieces of clipart to Microsoft Office customers every day. It was great fun. But there wa…
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing"
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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
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