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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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40 years later, a game for the ZX Spectrum will be again broadcast over FM radio
Anyone who still has a working Spectrum ZX will then be able to test the game.
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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
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Tony Hoare has died
Limousin, Saint-Yrieix-la-perche, Périgord, Université, société, Livres, citations, Nantes, Jumilhac
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CIA, MKUltra, and the cover-up of U.S. germ warfare in the Korean war (2022)
CIA & Army Counterintelligence involved in secret “processing” of U.S. POWs who confessed to using biological weapons against China, No…
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Black Triangles (2014)
One of my most popular posts was also my very first… which has since been lost to the Great Blog Devouring of ’14. So… here’s the post from over ten years ago (has it been that long?!?!?!) about an event from almost twenty years ago. Still stuff I have to remind myself about some days.
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The tech of 'Terminator 2' – an oral history (2017)
Ever since James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgment Day was released in 1991, I’ve been reading about the many ways ILM, led by visual effects supervisor Dennis Muren, had to basically invent new way…
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Movie posters from Ghana in the 1980s and 90s
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.
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Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org
tl;dr: Infinite Mac has a new home at infinitemac.org . Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4 . The project is also now accepting donations (via GitHub Sponsors or PayPal ).
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The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
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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.
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Happy Birthday Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Celebrating 10 Years of Firefox
10 years ago we built Firefox to give you a choice. The Web was a monoculture and the only way in was through the company that controlled your operating sy
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Why the Sun 2 has a message “Love your country, but never trust its government”
Yesterday, Alec Muffet posted a few tweets regarding the Sun SPARC 2 bootloader’s DES routines.
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We Made Amiga, They Fucked It Up (2015)
The Commodore/Amiga honeymoon could hardly have been more idyllic. Honoring the wishes of everyone at Amiga to not get shipped off to Commodore’s headquarters in West Chester, Pennsylvania, Commodore instead moved them just ten miles from their cramped offices in Santa Clara, California, to a spacious new facility in…
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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…
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Happy 15th Birthday .NET
Today marks the 15th anniversary since .NET debuted to the world. On February 13th, 2002, the first version of .NET was released as part of Visual Studio.NET. It seems just like yesterday when Microsoft was building its “Next Generation Windows Services” and unleashed a new level of productivity with Visual…
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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.
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Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
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The Moral Economy of the Shire
Who paid for this? There’s a certain meme that I see making the rounds on Facebook every so often about the bucolic nature of life in the Shire, from Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord o…
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Transiting the Suez Canal in a Private Sailboat (2003)
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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.
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Wing Commander III
Movies and computer games are my two favorite things. If I weren’t doing one I’d be doing the other.
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Harry Eng – Master Bottle Filler
Harry was born in 1932 and died in 1996. He was a school teacher, educational consultant, inventor, and magician. A web search will tell you a little about his many talents but in summary:
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Oliver Heaviside and the theory of transmission lines (2021)
(This is an adapted version of an article I wrote for the Dutch amateur radio magazine Electron , November 2021.)
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An elegy for GNU and RMS
Assorted thoughts about rms, the GNU project, the FSF, and the future.
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The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
Camel or rope? Examining the Greek word ‘kamilos’ and the origins of a persistent myth about the Bible.