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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
August 2010 When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing. It was supposed to be what Google turned out to be. What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the…
The systematic thinking errors that kill breakthrough technology and the decision framework that prevents these disasters
See how Mathematica was used to solve one of the cryptograms sent in a letter by the Zodiac Killer.
A deep dive into the text mode editors we had and how they compare to today's
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
the history of 3dfx Interactive
An essay about life pre-iPhone addiction, why you're wrong about Salt Bae, an Indian butter chicken Instant Pot adventure, and a new Hell & Wellness pod discussing Marie Kondo.
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I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
If you read the news , you may think the MP3 file format was recently officially “killed” somehow, and any remaining MP3 holdouts should all move to AAC now. These are all simple rewrites of Fraunhofer IIS’ announcement that they’re terminating the MP3 patent-licensing program.
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
I think the Rust language is a big success. When I think back on it I am in awe: so much had to go right to get where we are, and there were so many opportunities to go wrong. It took many tiny miracles for the Rust language to become what it has. Those miracles didn’t happen by accident though: each one was created…
Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office (OSPO), Team Xbox, and Activision are making Zork I, Zork II, and Zork III available under the MIT License.
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
What did people's desktops look like?
Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" compiler Trojan attack was not just a thought experiment. In fact, Usenet poster Jay Ashworth stated that, from personal communications, Thompson really did launch this attack in real life and successfully compromised the Unix Support Group at Bell Labs. Recently, I've rediscovered this…
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
Researchers have discovered ancient Roman concrete-manufacturing strategies that incorporated self-healing. Applying this knowledge toward modern cement production, they hope to improve the material’s environmental impact.
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-re
