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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 311 posts.
Check out our file conversion API – convert 100s of formats with just a few lines of code. In a special series Zamzar take a look at some of the people who have helped shape technology and made it… Read More Jason Scott
Space Shuttle thermal tiles conduct heat so poorly that after being in a 2200 °F oven for hours, you can pick them up with your bare hands only seconds after th
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
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…
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…
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
Resurrecting Days of Thunder from dying floppy disks took tenacity...and a little bit of luck.
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…
This week, we continue our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week, we looked at how a blacksmith reshapes our iron from a spo…
TL;DR: Down and to the right I wasn’t going to do this post until I learned IBM PR is out browbeating reporters (one of the rare activities where the company is still world class) for being “too ha…
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
Web developers rarely need to think to think about character sets in the modern world thanks to UTF-8. I made the journey from character hell to emoji nirvan...
Hey folks! Fireside this week, but next week, to celebrate the one-year anniversary of the blog (the first post went up May 3rd) we’re diving into a look at Helm’s Deep in both the book…
Anybody who has ever taken an advanced computer architecture class has heard of the CDC6600, which was the world’s fastest computer from 1964 to 1969. It was the machine that put Seymour Cray…
Google Wave debuted at I/O in May 2009 and shut down in April 2012. What happened, why it failed, and how its real-time engine still powers editors.
The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as "Dungeons and Drag Queens". Once thought to…
Over 3,000 military maps, views and prints collected by King George III have been digitised and published online free to visit by the Royal Collection
This week, we’re going to talk briefly about why ‘we’ – and by ‘we’ here, I mean the top-tier of modern militaries – have generally eschewed the systematic…
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: ...today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over d
