91
The camel, the rope, and the needle's eye
Camel or rope? Examining the Greek word ‘kamilos’ and the origins of a persistent myth about the Bible.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 422 posts.
92
I disapprove of what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it
Voltaire? François-Marie Arouet? S. G. Tallentyre? Evelyn Beatrice Hall? Ignazio Silone? Douglas Young? Norbert Guterman?
93
Boris Yeltsin's visit to a suburban Houston supermarket in 1989 (2016)
Many point to the fact that the Soviet Union collapse occurred as the Soviets were baited into trying to compete with the defense build-up ...
94
The 2002 Überlingen midair collision
The story of a tragedy which touched the hearts of the world and forced the industry to ask whether it had done enough to keep planes…
95
The Joy of Computer History Books
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
96
How Equifax Was Breached in 2017
On a Saturday night, a security engineer at Equifax was updating an SSL certificate on a Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS). Immediately after, suspicious connections were detected. After a more in-depth investigation, it became evident that the situation was far graver than anticipated. A service had to be…
97
The Development of the C Language (1993)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
98
"No inventions; no innovations" A History of US Steel
Last week, US Steel announced it was being acquired by Japanese steel company Nippon Steel.
99
DOS/4GW made Windows 95 game compatibility easier, but with higher stakes
A popular path to protected mode.
100
Voder Speech Synthesizer
A web emulation of Bell Labs VODER speech synthesizer from the 1939-40 New York World's Fair.
101
This code smells of desperation
A few weeks ago I had the questionable pleasure of diving into the math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library. Actually WIN87EM.DLL appears to have been first shipped with Windows 3.0, and the version in Windows 3.1 is more or less identical. The version shipped with…
102
Windows XP Activation: Game Over
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
103
104
Diablo
All of us had become disappointed with computer RPGs because they were going in the opposite direction of where we thought they should be going. They were becoming story- and stat-laden, really appealing to a super-small niche of super RPG geeks — which we were in a way, but that wasn’t really our style.
105
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
106
A treasury of Zork maps
Yesterday a Reddit link started going around the IF circles: "Wait," I thought, "haven't I seen that map before?" No, I had not. But I sort of had? Then I looked through my collection of Zork maps. Then I realized, oh no, I have a collection ...
107
The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
108
The TRON Project: How Japan almost ruled IT (2022)
Stockpicking of unloved and undervalued Japanese companies using the Graham and Dodd framwork of value investing.
109
The web’s most important decision
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
110
Sierra’s Macintosh Timebomb (2021)
On Saturday, September 18 1993, Sierra's Macintosh games stopped working. Franchises froze as King's Quests, Space Quests, and even the Leisurely Suited Larries locked up. Practically every Mac SCI game had broken overnight. Sierra developed a patch within nine days, released it on their BBS, and announced it in their…
111
Why 56k is the fastest dial up modem speed
10stripe is a collection of computer and technology information, providing answers to common questions and concerns.
112
Alan Kay on web browsers, document viewers, Smalltalk, NeWS and HyperCard (2021)
Alan Kay answered: “Actually quite the opposite, if “document” means an imitation of old static text media (and later including pictures…
113
Crisis over The Atlantic: The near crash of Air Transat flight 236
How a series of errors on the ground and in the air caused a fully loaded passenger jet to run out of fuel in the mid-Atlantic.
114
Eclipse: The Demo that Sold 3D to Nintendo
How a 17-year-old in the UK set the course for Nintendo's future.
115
SR-71 Blackbird Speed Check Story
There were a lot of things we couldn't do in an SR-71, but we were the fastest guys on the block and loved reminding our fellow aviators of this...
116
Top suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison hack committed suicide in 2014
When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [ SPOILER ALERT! ]…
117
Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
118
The 90s Developer Starter Pack
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
119
When Google paid websites to promote Firefox
Having grown up in the 2000s, I love discovering that things I presumed were banal back then were, in fact, part of a bigger story.
120
Treasure trove of mechanical animations (2015)
Whenever I watch videos of how things are made, I marvel at the cleverness of the manufacturing machines. Retired engineer Duc Thang Nguyen has created over 170