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Plain text has been around for decades and it’s here to stay
A blog about software craft and quality
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 326 posts.
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The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art (2024)
A follow-up to this text is available here . It goes into much greater detail about signal quality, and also examines how pixel art techniques have been used on non-CRT systems.
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Celebrating 70 Years of Fortran
Fortran : High-performance parallel programming language
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John Bradley, author of xv, has died
John Bradley, the longtime member of this community who was the founder, producer, and lead guitarist of Booster Patrol, died on March 20. He was 61. I couldn’t think of a better way to pay tribute to the man who was both a bandmate and a friend than to write a song for him in […]
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Pinocchio is weirder than you remembered
The original 1881 serial ended in chapter fifteen with the puppet hanging dead from an oak tree. Italian children wrote in begging the author to continue. He resumed reluctantly. What followed — donkey-skin drums, dead-girl fairies, a satire of every other moralising children's book in Italy — became one of the most…
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Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
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Before pixels: Modular industrial dashboards
A blog about software craft and quality
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How Pizza Tycoon simulated traffic on a 25 MHz CPU
Reverse engineering the traffic system from Pizza Tycoon (1994): how the original devs drove dozens of cars through a city with almost no CPU budget.
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Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 was awarded jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai "for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis"
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The Nobel Prize and the Laureate Are Inseparable
The medal and the diploma are the physical symbols confirming that an individual or organisation has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The prize itself – the honour and recognition – remains inseparably linked to the person or organisation designated as the laureate by the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
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Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme
A blog about software craft and quality
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Cleve Moler has died
Jack Little and Cleve Moler, cofounders of MathWorks, recognized the need among engineers and scientists for more powerful and productive computation environments beyond those provided by languages such as Fortran and C. In response to that need, they combined their expertise in mathematics, engineering, and computer…
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The paper computer
Now that we have actually good AI, I have this vision of a form of computing that doesn’t involve me using a computer so much. Imagine you had the day’s emails to go through. It would be nice if the ones that required a simple decision could be dispatched with a few pen-strokes: I could write down a date that would…
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The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the…
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William Gibson and the trademarking of cyberspace
Autodesk did trademark cyberspace, and William Gibson did get mad. But the story that Gibson retaliated by trademarking Eric Gullichsen was a prank by Timothy Leary.
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“Food JPEGs” in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders
Have you ever noticed that the food graphics in Super Smash Bros. and Kirby Air Riders are flat “billboarded” stock images of food? This artistic decision from director Masahiro Sakurai has per...
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Suica, Japan's First IC Transit Card
The humble Suica card was developed in the 90’s and has kept Japan moving for almost three decades. Here’s the story of how it came to be.
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Pentium II at 600Mhz with Voodoo 3 Emulated on 86Box with M6 Mac Mini
The best platform for cycle-accurate retro PC emulation may just be the Mac. The M6 achieved a stable 600MHz clock using a 6.0 derived 86Box build.
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Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64 has reached 100% matching decompilation. A brief note on what that means, how we got here, and what comes next.
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Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
Notes on Chapter 1 of Principia Mathematica
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The vi family
The last text editor you’ll ever need to learn.
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80386 microcode disassembled
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
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Decompiling a Nintendo 64 game in 84 days
The original Snowboard Kids has been fully decompiled in only 84 days! In this post I delve into what changed and what lessons might apply to future projects.
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Middle schooler finds coin from Troy in Berlin
A 13-year-old on a walk in the Spandau district of Berlin discovered a rare ancient bronze coin from Troy . It dates to between 281 and 261 B.C. and was issued by the mint at Ilion (Classical and Hellenistic era Troy). Now on display at the PETRI Museum, it is the first Greek antiquity ever discovered inside the city…