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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any …
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
I'm David Friedman , a professional photographer who sometimes gets ideas for photos, designs, gadgets, and other projects. I write about it all on this blog. You can find the meaning behind the name “Ironic Sans” back in the very first post .
It's well known that inheritance was invented by Simula . The History of Programming Languages session on Simula tells us the motivations behind that invention. Let's take a look.
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
Dinosaur is old enough, as well as Lisp, they may like each other. When I am talking about dinosaur here, I mean the dinosaur hiding in Google Chrome, it shows up when "There is no Internet connection".
Book review of the autobiography of Morris Chang.
UPDATE: Please read this later entry for update on this documentary. I’m putting this here to get some attention. There’s a documentary in production, or which was in prod…
After seeing some of the jaw-dropping and inspiring plotter art that's been popping up on #plottertwitter this year, I decided to get in on the fun. We don't
Some sad news to report on the blog this week. I got word that long-time Industrial Designer at Atari coin-operated division, Mike Jang, has passed away. I’ve known Mike since 2016, and whils…
Writing operating systems in a compiled machine-independent programming language.
about me I am 18, born in 2006. This is generally a good thing as I am in the prime of life currently. I am not one of those people who think they were “born in the wrong decade”, I think I was born at the perfect time to take advantage of superlinearly growing technological advancements. the internet today I…
Greece is a remarkable country full of wonderful people, but along dimensions of development and governance, the place is plainly pretty fucked up. It has been fucked up that way for a long time, for decades at least . This has never been secret. Anyone who has visited Athens knows it has far more in common with…
The man who invented the interactive fiction genre talks about its past and future.
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
On Saturday, September 18 1993, Sierra's Macintosh games stopped working. Franchises froze as King's Quests, Space Quests, and even the Leisurely Suited Larries locked up. Practically every Mac SCI game had broken overnight. Sierra developed a patch within nine days, released it on their BBS, and announced it in their…
A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming is not worth knowing. – Alan Perlis
I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — Wordstar.
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
10stripe is a collection of computer and technology information, providing answers to common questions and concerns.
This is one of my favorite geek stories of all time. I know I've mentioned it to a few of you recently, and you hadn't seen it, so here it is for posterity. Date: Wed, 27 Sep 89 10:27 PDT. From: "Thomas L. Mc Mahon" <tlm@riverside.scrc.symbolics.com> Subject: Cuts and jumpers (on a different scale) To…
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures…
