61
Did the early medieval era ever take place?
On the “phantom time hypothesis”, the bizarre conspiracy theory that 297 years of European history were entirely made up.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 390 posts.
62
The U.S.S. Akron and U.S.S. Macon, America's “flying aircraft carriers”
Akron and Macon were flying aircraft carriers designed for long-range scouting. Both crashed at sea, ending the U.S. Navy's rigid airship program.
63
A Square Meal – Foods of the ‘20s and ‘30s
[Content warning: Food, culture shock, milk] They say that the past is a foreign country, and nowhere is this more true than with food. The book is A Square Meal: A Culinary History of the Gr…
64
AOL 3.0 reverse engineered
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
65
Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)
American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
66
Patching an embedded synthesiser OS from 1996 with Ghidra
For reasons I won't get into, I've been working on a tricky reverse engineering puzzle recently: how to patch the operating system of a 26-year-old synthesizer. To be specific, the Kurzweil K2500, a...
67
Lanai, the mystery CPU architecture in LLVM
Disclaimer: I have had access to some confidential information about some of the matter discussed in this page. However, everything written here is derived form publicly available sources, and references to these sources are also provided.
68
Building a website like it's 1999
I'm on a bit of a mission this year to bring back the spirit of the old web. The creativity and flair of the late 90s and early 2000s. So I've recreated some of that old web magic, in modern HTML, CSS and JS.
69
Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)
But these browsers have one great feature: They give a very good indication whether a page is worth reading. If these browsers don't display anything, or the display looks shitty, there usually is not much content, either (In a few cases I looked up the page with something more advanced (e.g., Arena), and I was always…
70
Forgetting the Asbestos – how we lose knowledge and technologies
Or, how we lose knowledge and technologies. And what we can do about it.
71
72
Infinite Mac: An Instant-Booting Quadra in the Browser
I’ve extended James Friend’s in-browser Basilisk II port to create a full-featured classic 68K Mac in your browser. You can see it in action at system7.app or macos8.app . For a taste, see also this screencast:
73
Wii U Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
74
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
75
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.
76
77
Xbox 360 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
78
How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
79
A secret Apple Silicon extension to accommodate an Intel 8080 artifact
Lately I’ve been spending time on Mastodon for … reasons. Here’s my link: https://oldbytes.space/@blakespot. In my recently active time on the platform, I have found quite a few excellent retrocomputing-related posts by creative members of the community. One such post, … Continue reading →
80
The silenced deaths of the Shanghai 2022 lockdown
This is a different type of post. Here, instead of presenting the voice of a single person, I have translated selected stories shared on Weibo and elsewhere on the Chinese Internet—or more fittingl…
81
ACM Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens First 50 Years
World’s Largest Computing Society Makes Thousands of Research Articles Freely Available; Opens First 50 Years Backfile
82
Thatcher killed the UK’s superfast broadband before it even existed
Grrrh! I could get really annoyed about this! Living and working in rural Stirlingshire has its advantages for sure, but fast broadband is not one of them.
83
Calling NSA to find your encryption key after a few bits were flipped (2010)
I was just alerted to this story by one of the followers of this blog… Last month Voyager 2 began returning some unusual signals. This story is being reported by alternate news outlets as s…
84
SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started
I fell down the rabbit hole making a homebrew SNES game a few days ago, and since I couldn't find many good resources, I figured I'd write something of a tutorial.
85
The B-52 was designed in a hotel room over one weekend
Sandboxx News makes the complex approachable. Bridging the gap between academic expertise and practical boots-on-the-ground experience, we remove the mystery from conflict and highlight the importance of military service and deterrence-reinforcing technology.
86
An elegy for GNU and RMS
Assorted thoughts about rms, the GNU project, the FSF, and the future.
87
Nobel Prize in Physics Awarded to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2022 was awarded jointly to Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser and Anton Zeilinger "for experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science"
88
A little story about the `yes` Unix command
What’s the simplest Unix command you know?<br /…
89
Using grape harvest dates to estimate summer temperature over 650 years
It’s hot these days, it’s unusually hot, even dangerously hot, in a lot of places a lot of the time. While America has been hit hard this summer, it seems that Europe has been hit even …
90
Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest (2015)
While most of the Beinecke’s holdings are by their nature dead — their original purpose being fulfilled — the water bond still pays annual interest.