Topics /

History & Retro Computing

The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.

Any year
1083

The Secret Button

There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.

1089

A treasury of Zork maps

Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...

1092

The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks

Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…

1099

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021

The Nobel Prize in Physics 2021 was awarded "for groundbreaking contributions to our understanding of complex physical systems" with one half jointly to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselmann "for the physical modelling of Earth’s climate, quantifying variability and reliably predicting global warming" and the other half…

1101

Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol

Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…