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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
This map took me a long time to make, and is very detailed, but will always be incomplete and inaccurate due to the nature of language. Why this map is so detailed The diversity of English dialects in the United Kingdom is enormous. It’s common for people from either side of a river, mountain, or […]
Instructions for booting a PDP-11/34 with RT-11 from a RK05
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
The perennial question of homo sapiens is, 'How did we get here?' Today we're going to take a crack at answering that: where 'here' is defined as 'high availability for web services'.
CHM remembers Fellow Don Bitzer, computer pioneer who co-invented the flat-panel plasma display and was called the "father of PLATO.”
My thesis on Amiga ASCII art translated to English.
It was a quiet Wednesday afternoon. Wednesday, 1st October, 15:15 BST, to be precise, when Peter, an office-mate of mine, leaned away from his terminal and said to me, " Mario, I'm having a little trouble sending mail. " Knowing that msg was capable of confusing even the most capable of people, I sauntered over to his…
For the first time, researchers have put together all the climate data they have (from ice cores, coral, sediment drilling) into one chart that shows the “globa
Let's have a look at the Apple Power Macintosh G5 , a weighty space heater that can also perform computing tasks. So weighty that it crea...
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
The modern Linux distros owe their existence to those early releases, back in 1992.
I spend a fair amount of time working with legacy operating systems. Apart from being obsolete themselves they suffer from a common problem – the web browsers are simply unusable on a present day Internet. You start by getting JavaScript error on google.com and it only gets worse once you go further. Try going to…
Taking a good look around (both inside and out) of my brand new MEGA65 computer system from Trenz Electronic GmbH.
Even today, plenty of disinformation still abounds regarding the WIZ code. A 22.050Khz wobble that was used to identify legitimate CD's. Maybe one day we'll put them to rest... :)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
Do not be misled. The many "atomic time" wristwatches you see on the market today are merely cheap quartz wristwatches with a built-in radio receiver. The watch sets itself from 60 kHz VLF radio time signals transmitted by NIST from station WWVB near the US atomic clock in Boulder, Colorado. At least once a day…
If you are of a certain vintage, this image is burned indelibly somewhere in your posterior parietal complex: Oh, my old friend. How it’s been a long time. Cultural Significance For the uninitiated, what are we looking at? Could it be the Moiré Error from Doom? Well, no. You are looking at (part of) the boot up screen…
Making the rounds this week is the Computer World story of a Stratus Tech. computer at a parts manufacturer in Michigan. This computer has not had an unscheduled outage in 24-years, which seems rather impressive. Originally installed in 1993 it has served well. In 2010 it was awarded for being the longest serving…
I have spent the last couple of years teaching folks about surveillance and what they can do about it, primarily in partnership with the Civil Liberties Defense Center and through a interdisciplinary course on surveillance and social movements . In reading about surveillance, I had come across, in multiple places, a…
So many addressing modes, so little space.
It’d be difficult to argue against the fact that The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was. Even just a quick glance at the IMDb ratings is enough to see that the show is routinely not hitting the highs it did so regularly in the earlier seasons. I’d suggest...
It has been over 20 years since I wrote " Lisping at JPL ", half memoir and half geeky screed (and all of it half-baked) about how an obscur...
At first sight, the idea of 1,216-page two-volume work on keyboards for $150 might seem like a heavy lift. But it was years in the making.
“Writing is excessive drudgery. It crooks your back, it dims your sight, it twists your stomach and your sides.”
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
