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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
As work slowed down during the last couple of weeks of 2024, I decided to redirect some of my energy to hobbies instead of work. One such hobby is StarCraft: Brood War (or BW for short), a classic, highly competitive RTS from '98 that still has an active community today.
Where has all the weirdness gone?
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
Twenty years ago, Git was born. How did this unlikely "information manager" take over the world?
On StackExchange, someone asks why programmers talk about “calling” a function. Several possible allusions spring to mind: Calling a function is like calling on a friend — we go, we stay a while, we come back. Calling a function is like calling for a servant — a summoning to perform a task. Calling a function is like…
This is the story of how Apple made a mistake in the ROM of the Macintosh Classic II that probably should have prevented it from booting, but instead, miraculously, its Motorola MC68030 CPU accidentally prevented a crash and saved the day by executing an undefined instruction.
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
Large language models (LLMs) still feel a bit like magic to me. Of course, I understand the general machinery enough to know that they aren’t, but the gap between my outdated knowledge of the field and the state-of-the-art feels especially large right now. Things are moving fast. So six months ago, I decided to close…
It’s well known that video games today are disposable pieces of slop. Modern multiplayer games tend to fall into one of two categories: they’re abandoned after a while and the servers a…
"I’ve had enough reasonable file formats fired at me in my time to tell you that wasn’t one" - Sam Fisher
Like a lot of boys, I grew up loving trains. And like a lot of men, I retain my fascination for them today.
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
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At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
Our project to preserve the history of Sega Channel — including over 100 new Sega Channel ROMs.
The history of Vi & Vim goes hand in hand with the history of open-source software. This article looks at the historical events that shaped the evolution of these text editors.
And a surviving example of one surfaced in December 2024.
It isn’t always or even usually the pioneers who reap the rewards of the trails they blaze. As often as not, some pragmatic Johnny-come-lately pops in to make off with the booty.
As the PS2 turns 20 in Japan, a look back on its PS1 backwards compatibility from the eyes of the former Sony engineer responsible for it.
tl;dr: Infinite Mac can now run early Mac OS X , with 10.1 and 10.3 being the best supported versions. It’s not particularly snappy, but as someone who lived through that period, I can tell you that it wasn’t much better on real hardware. Infinite HD has also been rebuilt to have some notable indie software from that…
As the course progressed, I discovered that some of this stuff was actually logical, and also kind of fun. I found myself using the piano room just to play around. I never cared much for attempting to play sheet music, but the idea of hitting keys and getting a sound that was sometimes harmonious was strangely…
I want to wish everyone happy Yule festivities! Midwinter in the northern hemisphere has passed, the days are now slowly becoming longer.
Discover the wild world of Ghanaian and Nigerian hand-painted movie posters. Created by local artists in the 1980s and 1990s, these bold, surreal artworks turned Hollywood films into folk art masterpieces that are so bad they’re brilliant.
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
