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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 182 posts.
It's that time of year again, where we say Happy Birthday to one of my most favorite games, DOOM! Every year I try to reveal something about the game's development that hasn't been documented to death. Believe me, DOOM has been documented more than most games. But never fear, I have so much stuff th
A tragic case of how poor data analysis can lead to very bad outcomes.
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
I came across this fun column the other day listing a number of Famous Inventions , like the airplane, the camera, electricity, the car, e...
This is a document I wrote in 1995, while working on Neversoft’s first game: Skeleton Warriors. It was the first game I’d worked on where I did not use 68K Assembly.
In today's Xerox Alto restoration session we investigated why the disk drive isn't working and found a failed chip. With this chip repaire...
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
In this blogpost we'll see how Erlang's Syntax already appeared on TAOCP years before the language was even created.
In the previous Xerox Alto restoration session , we got the disk working, but the system didn't boot. After much investigation, I discove...
Note: This is a position piece, not a technical article. Hat tip to Jake Skelcy for requesting such a piece. Computers didn’t always have operating …
In Oracle’s early days Kathryn Gould was the founding VP of Marketing, working there from 1982 to 1984. When I heard that Larry Ellison was stepping down as Oracle’s CEO I asked Kathryn to think ab…
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
A lot has been said about the role of artillery in World War I, in both its intensity and ferocity. On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and s…
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
It’s not easy having a software superstar for a little brother. That’s something that Robert Garriott, president of Origin Systems , had more and more cause to realize as the 1980s wore on. Whilst Richard Garriott quite literally lived out his fantasies, it was Robert who was left to deal with all the mundanities of…
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun. The best example…
In 1980, two brothers from Texas controlled two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. This is the story of how one of history's biggest bets went bust.
[03 Oct 2016] Several donations boost reliability of Debian's core infrastructure [27 Sep 2016] The Debian Project mourns the loss of Kristoffer H. Rose [17 Sep 2016] Updated Debian 8: 8.6 released [09 Jul 2016] DebConf16 closes in Cape Town and DebConf17 dates announced [02 Jul 2016] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Jessie …
