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Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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I have 2000 old VHS tapes in my garage and don't know what to do with them
A story about data and a very foolish hobby
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If English was written like Chinese (1999)
The English spelling system is such a pain, we’d might as well switch to hanzi — Chinese characters. How should we go about it?
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Starcraft (A History in Two Acts)
Great success brings with it great expectations. And sometimes it brings an identity crisis as well.
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Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
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D&D is Anti-Medieval
You can be forgiven for thinking that OD&D is a medieval European fantasy game. After all, Gary Gygax himself says so. He describes the original D&D books as “Rules for Fantastic Medi…
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The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
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Power Metal: is it really about dragons? (2018)
Some years ago, Matt Daniels [1] wrote a great article on who has the largest vocabulary in hip-hop. I thought it was brilliant: comparing Shakespeare to famous hip-hop artists. It got me thinking and gave me the inspiration of doing something similar with a genre I love: Power Metal. People …
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I accidentally deleted a bad game revision from MAME
Awhile back, I had the chance to dump a game for MAME. I told myself that if the chance ever came up again, I’d contribute again. Luckily, it turns...
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Nobel Peace Prize for 2024 awarded to Nihon Hidankyo
The Nobel Peace Prize 2024 was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo "for its efforts to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons and for demonstrating through witness testimony that nuclear weapons must never be used again"
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MQTT turns 25
October 2024 marks the 25th anniversary of MQTT, a crucial protocol for connecting devices in diverse environments. With origins in lightweight networks, MQTT has flourished, empowering countless a…
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What happened to the Japanese PC platforms?
(This was originally posted on a social media site; I’ve revised and updated it for my blog.) The other day a friend asked me a pretty interesting...
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Cyc: History's Forgotten AI Project
Since 1984 a secretive AI project has been building a massive knowledge base to enable human-like reasoning. Will it work?
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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
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The Objects of Our Life (1983)
Exclusive video footage of Steve Jobs talking about his design vision and philosophy and how design worked at Apple.
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25 Years of Dillo
Back in 1999, a group of developers lead by Jorge Arellano Cid forked the Gzilla/Armadillo code originally developed by Raph Levien, and began working on what is now known as the Dillo web browser.
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On the nature of computing science (1984)
Now this summer school draws to a close, it seems appropriate to try to put its topic into some perspective
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CUNY paid Oracle $600M for its HR software (2013)
Guest Post Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I ...
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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.
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The forgotten war on beepers
30 years before parents and lawmakers sought to save youth from smartphones via age limits and bans in schools, a similar conversation took place about a pre-cursor to the cellphone: pagers Through the 1980s pagers became increasingly popular with teens, and also:
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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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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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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...