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Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236
How a series of errors on the ground and in the air caused a fully loaded passenger jet to run out of fuel in the mid-Atlantic.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Debian 9.2 released
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
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A Brief History of Fish Sauce
A brief history of fish sauce, from Ancient Asian recipes, Roman times, and through to today's many (delicious) uses.
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Riving, a Viking-age woodworking technique
Viking-age smiths used the process known as riving to reduce a tree trunk to planks or to other useful articles. Rather than sawing the wood, they split it. As a result, the grain of the wood follows the piece being fabricated, creating a much stronger item than if it had been sawn. It's one of several reasons why…
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Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...
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Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo
How a 17-year-old in the UK set the course for Nintendo's future.
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When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
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IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards
This week I was doing a bit of shopping for an external keyboard for my old Thinkpad x200 laptop. I've grown used to its comfy keyboard and its trackpoint, so I looked on ebay to see if I could find one of the older external USB equivalents.
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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
The technology industry is still young, but its history is already rich with myths and legends.
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“Man Becomes the Sex Organs of the Machine World” (2012)
Electric speeds create centres everywhere. Margins cease to exist on this planet. ( Understand Media , 1964.) Marshall McLuhan remains ...
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The tiny holdout building in the middle of Macy’s is back in view
The enormous faux shopping bag that served as an advertisement for Macy’s is mostly gone, save for a patch of red facing Sixth Avenue. Scaffolding covers the ground floor retail space, and da…
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8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
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Windows file system compression had to be dumbed down
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Wing Commander II
If there was ever any doubt inside Origin Systems that Chris Roberts’s Wing Commander was destined to join Ultima as the company’s second great franchise, it was banished the moment the first game in the new series was released on September 26, 1990, and promptly sold by some accounts 100,000 copies in its first month…
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Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: László Krasznahorkai
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art"
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A Story About ‘Magic' (1994)
Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
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Atari Tempest: Dave Theurer’s Masterpiece
It’s a brave man who tries to criticize Atari’s seminal groundbreaking game Tempest. More than any other classic arcade game, Tempest hit the arcade scene like a juggernaut. Nothing lik…
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Important women in CS who aren't Grace Hopper (2018)
I’m tired of hearing about Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Ada Lovelace. Can’t we think of someone else for once? I went ahead and compiled a bunch of really important women according to some fairly arbitrary rules: There’s a specific thing you can point to and say “That. That’s their contribution.” This leaves…
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Illegal Engineering
ILLEGAL ENGINEERING An illustrated lecture about the history of Safes and Safe breaking. The lecture is based round a large wooden safe with a video camera inside, projecting the inside of the door mechanism on a screen. This is currently my favourite lecture to perform. There's something very satisfying about the…
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The Brief Origins of May Day
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country…
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<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
Dan explores the history of two (much-maligned) HTML tags of the yesterweb. With blinking marquees!
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38% of webpages that existed in 2013 are no longer accessible a decade later
A quarter of all webpages that existed at one point between 2013 and 2023 are no longer accessible.