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Aster shootdown over Sydney in 1955
FOR more than three hours on a fine, calm August morning in 1955, the eyes of Sydney’s suburbia were fixed skyward, anxiously watching the flight of a pilotless Auster aeroplane
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086's instruction register
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
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Reconstructing a lost NES game from 30-year-old source code disks
Resurrecting Days of Thunder from dying floppy disks took tenacity...and a little bit of luck.
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What America looked like before the EPA, in photos
Popular Science has a series of photos taken by EPA staff in the early years of the agency after it was formed in the 1970s, that have since been digitized. It’
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The Curse of Monkey Island
Fair Warning: this article contains plot spoilers for Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge and The Curse of Monkey Island . No puzzle spoilers, however…
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Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
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A talk with Walter Bright about Empire
Our discussion on the creation of the great-granddaddy of all computer wargames
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Two Letters from Steve Jobs
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard insi…
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What I Learned from Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter
A new mentor of mine suggested I read Jeff Bezos’ Letter to Shareholders to refine my thoughts around building a career and a business.
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
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The British empire's resilient subsea telegraph network
subsea cables, internet infrastructure, telecom infrastructure, 2Africa, new subsea cable projects, layer 1 pricing on key international routes,
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Apple II DOS source code
Unlike the Apple I, the Apple II was fully assembled and ready to use with any display monitor. The version with 4K of memory cost $1298. It had color, graphics, sound, expansion slots, game paddles, and a built-in BASIC programming language.
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1960s IT department
In the late '60's I worked for Bell Labs for a few years managing a data center and developing an ultra high speed information retrieval system. It was the days of beehive hair on the women and big mainframe computers. One day I took a camera to work and shot the pictures below. I had a great staff, mostly women…
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Chasing the First Arcade Easter Egg
It all started with a project I was working on called “Fixing Gran Trak 10” about the first car racing arcade video game from 1974. I had completed the electrical repairs and was trying to intervie…
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Ross Anderson
Ross Anderson unexpectedly passed away Thursday night in, I believe, his home in Cambridge. I can’t remember when I first met Ross. Of course it was before 2008, when we created the Security and Human Behavior workshop. It was well before 2001, when we created the Workshop on Economics and Information Security. (Okay…
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They don't make 'em like that any more: Borland Turbo Pascal 7
Why half a million people learned to program in Pascal, when you’d think they had no earthly reason to.
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I Have No Enemies: My Final Statement (2009)
The Nobel Peace Prize 2010 was awarded to Liu Xiaobo "for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China"
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Little Things That Made Amiga Great
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…
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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! ]…
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The forbidden railway: Vienna-Pyongyang (2008)
ABOUT ME My name is Helmut and I was born in 1980 in Graz (Austria). Trains were my hobby since childhood. My 2nd hobby is travelling. Du...
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Homo sapiens declared extinct (1999)
First published in Nature magazine, November 1999.
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The "Windows XP Box" (2003)
I needed a small Windows XP machine and a Mini-ITX board was the obvious choice. So I decided to build my "Windows XP Box" in a Windows XP box. The external dimensions of the box are a tiny 243mm x 200mm x 48mm.
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Why is there a “small house” in IBM's Code page 437?
There's a small house in the moddle of IBM's Code Page 437. Why?
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1K colours on CGA: How it's done
[Update: VileR’s writeup of the 1K colour mode is now up. His has fewer technical details but is much easier to understand than mine as it has pictures!]