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The 90s Developer Starter Pack
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Amazon EC2-Classic Is Retiring
Update (August 23, 2023) – The retirement announced in this blog post is now complete. There are no more EC2 instances running with EC2-Classic networking. Update (July 29, 2021) – Added link to the Support Automation Workflow document & clarified link to AWS MGN pricing. Also updated the list of recommended instance…
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Direct Win32 API, weird-shaped windows, and why they mostly disappeared
The nice thing about Win32 is that it does not try to talk you out of any of this. It just gives you the messages, the handles, the drawing APIs, and enough rope to ...
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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.
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Debian 9.4 released
[10 Nov 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.6 released [05 Aug 2018] DebConf18 closes in Hsinchu and DebConf19 dates announced [14 Jul 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.5 released [23 Jun 2018] Updated Debian 8: 8.11 released [01 Jun 2018] Debian 7 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [10 Mar 2018] Updated Debian 9: 9.4 released
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Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
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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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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
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Reasons the MI6 Story Is a Lie
The Sunday Times has a story claiming that Snowden’s revelations have caused danger to MI6 and disrupted their operations. Here are five reasons it is a lie. 1) The alleged Downing Street source is quoted directly in italics. Yet the schoolboy mistake is made of confusing officers and agents. MI6 is staffed by…
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Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
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Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy. All Finns were r...
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The Piccadilly line’s new air conditioned trains
A railway running through the forests of west Germany is seeing a very unusual sight at the moment - as a Piccadilly line tube train is running through the area.
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Why 1866 Set the Stage for Two World Wars
When some search for the roots of the First World War, there is a tendency to look towards the Balkans. After all, it was the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of the Austro-Hungarian E…
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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age
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Twenty years after Pokémon launched, its impact on Wikipedia remains
Years ago, the English Wikipedia was being overrun by a deluge of articles on Pokémon characters and creatures.
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A study of musical scales (2017)
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
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Knuth reward check
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
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The Later Years of Douglas Adams
If God exists, he must have a sense of humor, for why else would he have strewn so many practical jokes around his creation? Among them is the uncanny phenomenon of the talented writer who absolutely hates to write.
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
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Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES
The Super Nintendo classic started life on the 8-bit NES. That version was considered lost...until now.
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The Panic Sign
After many many years of writing apps and doing things, Panic finally feels like a real company. Why now? Well, we put our name on a building. That’s right, we’re hittin’ the small big leagues, baby! But this isn’t just for show or ego — it’s a little bit cooler than that. Read on.
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Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)
Was the Internet Created for Nuclear War?