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The Influence of Bell Labs
We’ve talked previously about Bell Labs’ long, storied history as an innovation engine and a generator of new technology.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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John Peel Sessions
Renowned Music Blogger, Dave Strickson, listens to some of the people that mattered in the history of music.
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Knuth and the Unix Way
Another great post
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VisiCalc Reconstructed
Building a minimal VisiCalc clone from scratch in C to understand how spreadsheets work.
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What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016?
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2016? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1959 The films North by Northwest and Ben-Hur, the play A Raisin in the Sun, the books The Naked Lunch and Starship Troopers, the first episodes of The Twilight Zone, and more. . . Current US law…
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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
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Reverse engineering and dismantling Kekz headphones
Close to a year ago, I stumbled upon the Kekz Headphones, which seemed like an interesting approach on the whole digital audio device space. They claimed to work without any internet connection and all of the content already on the headphones itself. They are On-Ear Headphones, which work by placing a small chip (I…
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It's a shame what's happened to radio
Why I wouldn't enjoy returning to radio as a disk jockey.
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What happened to the US machine tool industry?
Machine tools – machines that cut or form metal – are the heart of industrial civilization.
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You can legally get and run WordPerfect for free
In fact, there are two free versions: one for Classic MacOS, made freeware when WordPerfect discontinued Mac support, and a native Linux version, for which Corel offered a free, fully-working, demo version. But there is a catch of course: theyre both very old and hard to run on a…
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Singapore Airlines Concorde
Sleek, supersonic, and short-lived. Here’s how Singapore Airlines’ Concorde service to London fell victim to politics, nationalistic jealousies, and soaring costs.
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Hindenburg’s Smoking Room
Yes, there really was a smoking room on the Hindenburg… even though the zeppelin was inflated with 7 million cubic feet of highly flammable hydrogen...
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The beginning of the end for copper wire
The FCC voted last Thursday to relax the rules for retiring copper wiring. This change was specifically aimed at Verizon and AT&T and is going to make it a lot easier for them to tear down old …
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Quotes from 1992
I was recently recommended to read the book [Accidental Empires](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accidental_Empires) by [Robert X. Cringely](...
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DOS game “F-15 Strike Eagle II” reverse engineering/reconstruction war stories
Misadventures in 16bit reverse engineering, programming WTFs and general rants about the IT industry.
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Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
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The Incredibly Stupid One
After being captured by enemy soldiers during the Vietnam War, U.S. Navy sailor Douglas Hegdahl’s cleverness and creativity allowed him to uncover valuable information about the prison camp.
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Infinite Mac: Turning to the dark side
tl;dr: No, not Windows¹, but I’ve decided to expand Infinite Mac to the the black hardware that Mac users secretly lusted after in the 80s and 90s: NeXT. There is now a runnable collection of all notable NeXTStep versions , going from the initial 0.8 preview in 1988 to the final OPENSTEP 4.2 release in 1997.
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Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” released
[02 Nov 2011] DebConf12 Nicaragua dates confirmed [08 Oct 2011] Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.3 released [01 Oct 2011] Updated Debian GNU/Linux 5.0: 5.0.9 released [18 Sep 2011] Upcoming point releases and call for test [16 Aug 2011] Debian Community celebrates its 18th birthday [30 Jul 2011] DebConf11 ends as another…
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Eden Abhez: The strangest hit songwriter
He wrote one of my favorite songs, but was so much more than a composer
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Brute Force Colors
Using modern brute force approach to improve image quality on retro computers, by Arnaud Carré
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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...
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The integrated timetable of Switzerland
When people talk about great nation-wide public transit systems, names such as Japan or Switzerland are often mentioned. In this article I will show what makes Switzerland’s network so unique and why it is has become so popular.
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A communist Apple II and fourteen years of not knowing what you're testing
It is Friday. KPMG , the consultancy behemoth that delivers business Venn diagrams for outrageous prices, informs us that 70 percent of UK business leaders will keep spending on AI even when they can’t prove it does anything — the consultancy helpfully suggests we stop calling it “investment” and start calling it a…
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The History of Computer RPGs
It’s finally here! I present you our fifth release, the 450-page preview of the CRPG Book! DOWNLOAD IT HERE: CRPG Book Preview 5 This will be the last “alpha preview”, as the book…
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Using Opus 5.5 to discover a new eyewitness record of the dodo
Frontier models can now produce novel historical knowledge, but in a really weird way