1021
Retiring Internet Explorer
Prelude In late 2004, I was the Program Manager for Microsoft’s clipart website, delivering a million pieces of clipart to Microsoft Office customers every day. It was great fun. But there wa…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
1022
The duties of John von Neumann's assistant (1993)
25 recent entries The horn of the Robert Smalls A difficulty in race-switching the Dukes of Hazzard On futile explanations Richard Blair Race-switching The Dukes of Hazzard Greek plural Erbaut Improved English-language month names I fix a thirty-year-old mistake Minced oaths? On the monobosom Partly about pie More…
1023
Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
1024
1025
“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
1026
I miss the programmable web (2021)
In some ways, we've taken a few steps back from a programmable web—two things I miss: bookmarklets and user scripts. Imagine having a bookmarked shortcut to do complex things like taking screenshots or saving a PDF. O...
1027
Windows XP Activation: Game Over
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
1028
1029
How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
1030
Reverse-engineering the 1998 Ultima Online demo server
After 10 years of on-and-off work, I’m releasing a full reverse-engineering of the 1998 Ultima Online demo server: https://github.com/draxinar/ouo . About 5,000 functions disassembled from MSVC x86 and translated into portable C99, with each function compared instruction-by-instruction against the binary.
1031
Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine
Introduction During the late 1980s, Namco set out to create the world’s largest arcade game. The result was Galaxian3: Project Dragoon; a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the …
1032
I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
1033
Iliad fragment found in Roman-era mummy
A papyrus fragment of Homer’s epic The Iliad has been discovered inside the wrappings of Roman-era mummy . The mummy was found in a necropolis the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus (modern-day El-Bahnasa) in Egypt’s Minya Governorate. Archaeologists were able to remove the papyrus and identify the text as the “Index of…
1034
How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
1035
Computer science as a lost art (2015)
An old friend of mine asked me this in email last night...
1036
KDE at 30
KDE is an open community of friendly people who want to create a world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.
1037
1038
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing"
1039
Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)
[ Update 10/21/2015: Changed the title from "six lines of C" to "462 bytes of C" to avoid endless arguments about what constitutes a line of C code.]
1040
Reviving Old X Code
I've taken the week between Christmas and New Year's off this year. I didn't really have anything serious planned, just taking a break from the usual routine. As often happens, I got sucked into doing a project when I received this simple bug report Debian Bug #974011
1041
Amazon’s distributed computing manifesto (1998)
Today, I am publishing the Distributed Computing Manifesto, a canonical document from the early days of Amazon that transformed the architecture of Amazon's ecommerce platform. It highlights the challenges we were facing at the end of the 20th century, and hints at where we were headed.
1042
A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
1043
A dream of an ultimate OS (1995)
A vision of an OS that recognizes that any user activity and most of the system activities are nothing but queries, which ought to be treated uniformly and implemented efficiently once and for all; database as a file system; A paper submitted to MacHack'95
1044
Can I Talk to that William Fellow? He was so Helpful (2009)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
1045
What's the difference between the com and exe extensions? (2008)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
1046
A brief history of code signing at Mozilla
Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is
1047
Ghosts in the rom
While digging through dumps generated from the Apple Mac SE ROM images we noticed that there was a large amount of non-code, non-audio data. Adam Mayer tested
1048
The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
1049
What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of Mad Magazine
What, Me Worry? The Art and Humor of MAD Magazine This exhibition explores the unforgettable art and satire of MAD, from its beginnings in 1952 as a popular humor comic book to its emergence as a beloved magazine that spoke truth to power and attracted generations of devoted readers
1050
Why are all Windows drivers dated June 21, 2006?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.