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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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DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes
A popular path to protected mode.
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A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)
Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions , and successfully bloc...
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Alone in the Dark
Most videogame stories are power fantasies. You spend your time getting ever stronger, ever tougher, ever more formidable as you accumulate experience points, gold, and equipment. Obstacles aren’t things to go around; they’re things you go through. If you can’t get past any given monster, the solution is to go kill…
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How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
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Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
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Len Sassaman and Satoshi: A cypherpunk history
We’ve lost far too many hackers to suicide. What if Satoshi was one of them?
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Using generative AI as part of historical research: three case studies
... in specific domains. Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean
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How ancient people saw themselves
The art of the ancient mirror
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8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
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Nine – seemingly impossible C64 demo
Nine is a small, seemingly impossible C64 demo that I released at Fjälldata 2025.
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Nokia made too many phones
TextQuery is a desktop app to import data file as a table, query it using SQL.
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P. J. O'Rourke, 1947-2022
Brilliant writer, beautiful soul
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Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you’ve never heard of (2014)
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
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How the Apple archive ended up at Stanford
The Real Story
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Master of Orion
Given the shadow which the original Master of Orion still casts over the gaming landscape of today, one might be forgiven for assuming, as many younger gamers doubtless do, that it was the very first conquer-the-galaxy grand-strategy game ever made. The reality, however, is quite different. For all that its position…
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The two Christian saints who are the Buddha
Let me tell you the story of saints Barlaam and Josaphat of India. A king named Abenner, who persecutes Christians, hears from his court astrologers that his son will attain great power and rule ov…
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Doom as a tool for system administration (1999)
As I was listening to Anil talk about daemons spawning processes and sysadmins killing them, I thought, "What a great user interface!" Imagine running around with a shotgun blowing away your daemons and processes, never needing to type kill -9 again.
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This code smells of desperation
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
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Secret Military Telephone Buttons
It's the first of the new year, which means we ought to do something momentous to mark the occasion, like a short piece about telephones. Why so much on telephones lately? I think I'm just a little burned out on software at the moment and I need a vacation before I'm excited to write about failed Microsoft ventures…
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How machines learned precision
How do you make an accurate machine without one to copy? Explore flat surfaces, screw-cutting lathes, and millionth-of-an-inch measurements through interactive 3D figures.
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Microsoft BASIC for 6502 – Original Source Code (1978)
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
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/dev/zero has infinite electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them
Delightfully useless epiphany: Suppose the null-byte is an electron. Then, /dev/zero provides an infinite supply of electrons and /dev/null has an infinite appetite for them. Let's call these devices Vss and Vdd , respectively.
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Garmin's –$40B Pivot
The GPS pioneer took direct hits from Apple (iPhone, Watch) and Google (Maps). But huge R&D investment helped turn the company from an automotive GPS firm to a leader in fitness watches and trackers.
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