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“There are people who can see and others who cannot even look”
The greatest early photographer's portraits of Hugo, Manet, Dumas, and more
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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My teen years: The transputer operating system
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
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I have been writing a niche history blog for 15 years
A special appeal to support Res Obscura on its Crystal Anniversary
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macOS Icon History
Documenting the evolution of macOS system icons over the past several decades.
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How Unix spell ran in 64kb RAM
How do you fit a dictionary in 64kb RAM? Unix engineers solved it with clever data structures and compression tricks. Here's the fascinating story behind it.
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Using generative AI as part of historical research: three case studies
... in specific domains. Three case studies with GPT-4o, o1, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, and what they mean
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How ancient people saw themselves
The art of the ancient mirror
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Nine – seemingly impossible C64 demo
Nine is a small, seemingly impossible C64 demo that I released at Fjälldata 2025.
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Garmin's –$40B Pivot
The GPS pioneer took direct hits from Apple (iPhone, Watch) and Google (Maps). But huge R&D investment helped turn the company from an automotive GPS firm to a leader in fitness watches and trackers.
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Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
As one of the co-creators of Crash Bandicoot, I have been (slowly) writing a long series of posts on the making of everyone’s favorite orange marsupial. You can find them all below, so enjoy.…
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Restoring the Galaxian3 Theatre 6, 1992 six player arcade machine
Introduction During the late 1980s, Namco set out to create the world’s largest arcade game. The result was Galaxian3: Project Dragoon; a 28 player behemoth that debuted in April 1990 at the …
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I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
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A brief history of code signing at Mozilla
Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is
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The demo scene is dying, but that's alright
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
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Mac Mini G4 – The best « classic » Macintosh for retro-gaming?
The Mac Mini G4 promises to be compatible with almost every Macintosh software released until the early 2000s. This article explains why and puts the machine to the test.
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2k-year-old wine and the uncanny immediacy of the past
Why artifacts like the Carmona Wine Urn, the Pazyryk Rug, and the Sword of Goujian are so important
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Rebecca Heineman – from homelessness to porting Doom (2022)
Today Rebecca Burger Becky Heineman shares the tale of porting Doom to the 3DO console under extreme conditions. There is an engine to tweak, deadlines to hit, hardware acceleration to get working, and dramatic rock anthems to record. We also learn about how game piracy led her to game development and what it was like…
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The History of S.u.S.E
The other enterprise Linux company
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Interview with Japanese Demoscener 0b5vr
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
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Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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Power Failure: The downfall of General Electric
Power Failure by William Cohan chronicles the spectacular collapse of General Electric, once America's most valuable company. From a $600 billion giant to near-bankruptcy, GE's downfall reveals how financialization and imperial CEOs destroyed a 130-year industrial icon.
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What happened to Transmeta, the last big dotcom IPO
Linus Torvalds worked for them after he completed his degree, but left in 2003
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FPGA Based IBM-PC-XT
Recently I undertook a hobby project to recreate an IBM XT Personal Computer from the 1980s using a mix of authentic parts and modern technology. I had a clear goal in mind: I wanted to be able to …
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When the sun will literally set on what's left of the British Empire
A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn't. The UK's widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
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How the UK lost its shipbuilding industry
From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.
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Nobel Prize in Literature 2025: László Krasznahorkai
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2025 was awarded to László Krasznahorkai "for his compelling and visionary oeuvre that, in the midst of apocalyptic terror, reaffirms the power of art"
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The Brief Origins of May Day
Most people living in the United States know little about the International Workers' Day of May Day. For many others there is an assumption that it is a holiday celebrated in state communist countries like Cuba or the former Soviet Union. Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country…
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<Blink> and <Marquee> (2020)
Dan explores the history of two (much-maligned) HTML tags of the yesterweb. With blinking marquees!
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So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
A Toast to the Frood Who Really Knew Where His Towel Was