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30 years on from introducing the Web to the World
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 337 posts.
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Nintendo DS-TV-Out Restoration Project
How Instagram helps gamers build authority, attract sponsors, and grow a loyal community beyond the game.
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Alan Kay on the context and catalysts of personal computing
Alan Kay — “father of personal computers" — is best known for his work on personal computing and for leading the team that developed Smalltalk.
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PDP-11 Booting
Instructions for booting a PDP-11/34 with RT-11 from a RK05
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The Linux Distributions of 1992
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
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A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
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OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
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Why V7 Unix matters so much
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The computer revolution hasn’t happened yet (1997)
In this video, Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems.
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2021 was awarded jointly to David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian "for their discoveries of receptors for temperature and touch"
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Reverse-Engineering NES Tetris to Add Hard Drop
Tetris for the NES is one of my favourite versions of Tetris. My only complaint is that it lacks the ability to “hard drop” - instantly dropping the current piece and locking it into place.
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A brief history of router architecture
Here's what we've learnt about networks and the routers that interconnect them in the last 50 years.
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All Futurama Opening Quotes
All Futurama Opening Quotes in order, Futurama is the whipping boy of modern prime time cartoons, Made by the creators of Simpsons.
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27th International Obfuscated C Code Contest winners published
IOCCC Year 2020
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The Time Everyone “Corrected” the World’s Smartest Woman (2015)
In 1990, Marilyn vos Savant correctly answered a probability puzzle in her column for Parade Magazine. And then, the world called her an idiot.
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Philippine ethnic group has most Denisovan DNA
The Philippine ethnic group Ayta Magbukon has the highest proportion of genes from our extinct relatives, the Denisovans, a new study led by Uppsala University shows. Their Denisovan share far exceeds that of ethnic groups in Papua New Guinea, who previously held the record. The study is published in the scientific…
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
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The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)
21 November 2020 The story goes that all spiral* staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. It is a particular favourite of tour guides, appears in castle guidebooks (Hodgson…
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20 Years of Haiku
Dedication asks each of its adherents to have faith even as time and energy pass through from one year to the next. Dedication brings with it a variety of challenges, but also rewards. Dedication is something most people claim to have, but few …
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1988: P.R.E.S.T.A.V.B.A.
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
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1984: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive fiction.
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Black Hat Exploits of the Stupid-Easy 80s
I'm not saying there was no computer security in the 1980's but, wait... Yes. Yes I am.
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
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The Itanic Has Sunk
By today, July 29, 2021, Intel has shipped the last of its …
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I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream
To the person who [is] contemplating buying this game, what would I say? I would say take your money and give it to the homeless, you’ll do more good. But if you are mad to buy this game, you’ll probably have a hell of a lot of fun playing it, it will probably make you uneasy, and you’ll probably be a smarter person…
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
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When Orcs Were Real
The Ancient Struggle for Homo Sapiens to Rule the Earth
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