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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 122 posts.
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Why Retired Aircraft are Stored in the Desert
By Mark W. Danielson Why are all these airliners in the desert? In a word, they’re being preserved. Aircraft bone yards are a testament to t...
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Ultima Underworld bugs
As we (Blue Sky Productions, later Looking Glass Technologies / Studios) were developing Ultima Underworld in 1991–1992, largely in a basement room in an office building in Somerville’s Davis Square, we received bug reports both from our own people and the QA team at Origin Systems, who published the game. “Our own…
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A Philosopher Every Programmer Should Know: Susanne K. Langer
Get your very own domain easily. Fast and professional customer service.
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After 24 centuries, Google puts the Dead Sea Scrolls online for the world to see
(Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog and the Google.org Blog ) It’s taken 24 centuries, the work of archaeologists, scholars and histo...
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What Alan T. did for his PhD
We’ve all been there before: by the time you start graduate school in Princeton, you’ve already invented the Turing machine, pioneered the concept of computational universality, and pro…
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Steve at NeXT
Late in 1989 I opened my email one morning and there was one from sjobs@next.com saying “come see us.” So I went and spent the day and failed to make a sale, but so did Mr. Jobs.
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Making of Crash Bandicoot - GOOL
I’m always being asked for more information on the LISP based languages I designed for the Crash and Jak games. This post is about GOOL, the LISP language used in Crash 1, Crash 2, and Crash …
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The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
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In the Shadow of John McCarthy
John McCarthy was a genius of the highest order. Much is known about his contribution to Lisp as its inventor, but he was also the mind behind much of early AI research, the progenitor of much of computer chess, and the initiator of time-sharing. As a Lisp advocate I have many thanks due to John McCarthy and it…
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Native Client: Getting Ready for Takeoff
Over the last few months we have been hard at work getting Native Client ready to support the new Pepper plug-in interface. Native Client ...
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The Netscape Dorm (1994)
If someone has linked you to this page, they're probably trying to con you. Don't fall for it. In fact, stop reading right now. Don't read this page. Go read this page instead.
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The Rise of "Worse is Better"
Previous: Lisp's Apparent Failures Up: Lisp's Apparent Failures Next: Good Lisp Programming is Hard
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And so I'm giving up the Mozilla project - Jamie Zawinski (1999)
April 1st, 1999 will be my last day as an employee of the Netscape Communications division of America Online, and my last day working for mozilla.org.
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Quote Origin: The Market Can Remain Irrational Longer Than You Can Remain Solvent
Question for Quote Investigator: The gyrations of financial markets can be startling. You may have unassailable information indicating that a stock is overpriced or underpriced, but you can still lose money because the market price may not accurately reflect the underlying verities for years. Here is a pertinent adage:
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Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!
Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day! In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online. It took some doing. There is comedy. First, the fun stuff: Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected…
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He Who Controls the Bootloader
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
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History of the Open Source Initiative
Development based on the sharing and collaborative improvement of software source code has a history essentially as long as software development itself. In the late 1990s, interest and participatio…
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Chapter 5. Hacker Writing Style
We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells ‘wrong’ as ‘worng’. Others have been…