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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 216 posts.
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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
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Usenet, authentication, and engineering: early design decisions for Usenet
A Twitter thread on trolls brought up mention of trolls on Usenet . The reason they were so hard to deal with, even then, has some lessons for today; besides, the history is interesting. (Aside: this is, I think, the first longish thing I’ve ever written about any of the early design decisions for Usenet. I should…
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So Long Last /8 and Thanks For All the Allocations
On 17 April 2018, we allocated the last available block of 1,024 addresses in 185/8 - the last /8 we received from IANA back in 2011. This article looks at how this address space was allocated and how it is used today. It's important to keep in mind that while 185/8 is finished, we still have aroun…
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Reflections on DOOM's Development
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for
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DDR Type 2 Short-wave spy transmitter
East-German spy radio set Type 2, used during the Cold War by agents working for East-Germany (DDR).
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Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)
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Yakhchal: Ancient Refrigerators (2009)
By 400 BC, Persian engineers had mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert. The ice was brought in during the winters from nearby mountains in bulk amounts, and stored in a Yakhchal , or ice-pit. These ancient refrigerators were used primarily to store ice for use in the summer, as…
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Dostoyevsky's “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (2014)
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”
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Under River, Outside Time: The Woolwich Foot Tunnel Anomaly
When the Woolwich foot tunnel closed for repairs in 2011, it should have been a routine job. The pathway had been providing pedestrians with a quick route beneath the Thames since 1912. A century o…
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Browser-Wars History: MD5-Hashed Posts Declassified
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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The Slide Rule
At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical orbits with two foci, and then set out to prove it mathematically. 4 years and 900 pages of…
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Newsgroups and the Internet Archive: I Made a Difference
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
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Booting Windows NT 4 on a DEC Multia
The Multia feels to me like Digital’s take on a high-end “legacy-free” (at introduction in late 1994) desktop. Its spec sheet includes features unheard of in its contemporaries:
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The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
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How Isaac Asimov shaped robotics and space exploration and predicted the Internet
Some futurists try to foresee the future. Others attempt to shape it. Yet prolific science-fiction author and biochemist Isaac Asimov did both. Asimov not
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Ten years of V8
An overview of major milestones for the V8 project in the past 10 years as well as the years before, when the project was still secret.
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Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community, died in the Camp wildfire
Bill Godbout, a legend in the S-100 community for his 1970s-1980s work at Godbout Electronics and CompuPro, perished November 8 due to the Camp wildfire in Concow, California. He was 79.
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Atari Asteroids: Creating a Vector Arcade Classic
As Atari’s best-selling arcade game of all time, Asteroids was literally a game changer. Released in December 1979, it was responsible for catapulting Atari into mainstream public consciousne…
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The Transistor, Part 3: Endless Reinvention
For over a hundred years the analog dog wagged the digital tail. The effort to extend the reach of our senses – sight, hearing, even (after a manner of speaking) touch, drove engineers and sc…
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Version Control Before Git with CVS
What it was like using version control before distributed repositories and commit graphs.
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Kottke.org is 20 years old today
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
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The Source History of Cat
A tour of the many historical implementations of the Unix cat utility.