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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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Reverse engineering the Sega Channel game image file format
Sega Channel was a games-on-demand service that gave cable subscribers access to a library of around 50 Sega Genesis games per month in exchange for a monthly fee (typically $10-$15/month depending on the cable provider). It operated between June 1994 (with a nationwide rollout in December 1994) and June 1998. Cable…
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The 640 K Barrier
There was a demon in memory. They said whoever challenged him would lose. Their programs would lock up, their machines would crash, and all their data would disintegrate.
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Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
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2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
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Loss of nearly a full decade of information from early days of Chinese internet
In a post to China’s popular WeChat platform last week, one writer bemoaned the shocking loss of nearly a full decade of information from the early days of the country’s domestic internet. Within hours the writer's reflections had vanished too.
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Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
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Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
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The Craft of Text Editing (1999)
Copyright 1999 by Craig A. Finseth. Contact the author with questions about distribution rights.
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Scott and Scurvy: How the cure for scurvy was lost
Writing about the first winter the men spent on the ice, Cherry-Garrard casually mentions an astonishing lecture on scurvy by one of the expedition’s doctors:
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Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer. Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006…
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Michael Atiyah has died
We are very sorry to hear of the death of Michael Atiyah. Michael was a giant of mathematics. He held many positions including Savilian Professor of Geometry here in Oxford, President of the Royal Society, Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, the founding Directorship of the Isaac Newton Institute and Chancellor of…
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Daring Fireball: Steve Jobs Dies
Link to: http://www.apple.com/
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The History of S.u.S.E
The other enterprise Linux company
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WordPerfect for UNIX (1992)
I found this interesting print-ad for WordPerfect for UNIX, apparently the best UNIX product of 1992! (Very) Belated congratulations Corel!
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The tyranny of the wagon equation
A mathematical extension to ACOUP's recent blog post on military logistics
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Running a Minecraft Server and more on a 1960s UNIVAC Computer
18 bit registers, 90kb of memory, ones’ complement, powered by RISC-V.
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The Internet Archive and Jason Scott are saving our weird Internet history
Check out our file conversion API – convert 100s of formats with just a few lines of code. In a special series Zamzar take a look at some of the people who have helped shape technology and made it… Read More Jason Scott
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The lost ways of programming: Commodore 64 BASIC (2020)
How we interact with programming environment matters more than the language, but such interaction has never been widely studied. Inspired by the idea of 'complementary science', this essay recovers interesting ideas from how programming used to be done using Commodore 64 BASIC. Reading about interactions is not enough…
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Egyptian Circumnavigation of Africa ~600 BC
The Greek researcher and storyteller Herodotus of Halicarnassus (fifth century BCE) was the world's first historian. In The Histories , he describes the expansion of the Achaemenid empire under its kings Cyrus the Great , Cambyses and Darius I the Great , culminating in king Xerxes ' expedition in 480 BCE against the…
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Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
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South Kensington station's escalator replacement project
Deep underneath South Kensington tube station, a huge project is underway to replace all five of the station's escalators, and all of them at the same time.
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Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
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Chromium Blog: A New Crankshaft for V8
Today we are introducing Crankshaft, a new compilation infrastructure for V8, Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine. By using aggressive optimi...
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