1411
I made a floppy disk from scratch
Polymatt decided he was going to make a 3.5” floppy disk from scratch — and actually did. I’m not sure how many of you have actually cracked one of these things
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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My favorite 1980's Canadian TV show: Bits and Bytes
Reflections on whatever I'm thinking about that week (the web, culture, computer graphics, math etc)
1414
Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
1415
Hello from 1978
We rescued two PDP-11/34 computers and their associated equipment from a storage unit in the Bronx and have been working on getting them running again. The
1416
Archive of old military maps published
Over 3,000 military maps, views and prints collected by King George III have been digitised and published online free to visit by the Royal Collection
1417
How the Mac didn’t bring programming to the people
HyperTalk, AppleScript, Prograph, Automator, Swift Playgrounds and Shortcuts – all wonderful tools in their day, but none has brought coding to the crowd.
1418
History of AOL Warez
Link to original post on rajuabju.com Before I begin, let me state the following: This is my personal perspective of the history of Warez ...
1419
Area 5150: 8088 MPH gets a successor
In case you have missed it, over the weekend, a new demo for IBM PC with CGA was released at Evoke, under the name Area 5150. It placed first in the competition, which should not surprise anyone: I…
1420
How Lewis Carroll computed determinants (2023)
Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) developed a method of computing determinants which has some practical advantages.
1421
Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
1422
Some memories of Niklaus Wirth
January 2024
1423
Polish general who fought with Washington may have been female
Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, 1777. At the end of a daylong battle, George Washington’s right flank has completely collapsed. British troops are closing in. A dashing Polish cavalry officer reports to Washington’s bodyguard that they are in danger of being surrounded. Washington orders Casimir Pulaski to gather as many…
1424
The flood that filled the Mediterranean Sea - in one year
"Zanclean Megaflood? What's that, a glam-rock band?"
1425
Reviving the 1973 Unix Programmer's Manual
The 1973 Fourth Edition of the Unix Programmer’s Manual doesn’t seem to be available online in typeset form. This is how I managed to recreate it from its source code.
1426
Tweaking Stunt Island's 30-year-old 3D engine
Note: the patch is available at the end of the article ( HERE ). This post is about its making-of.
1427
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
1428
The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)
21 November 2020 The story goes that all spiral* staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. It is a particular favourite of tour guides, appears in castle guidebooks (Hodgson…
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Joe Biden tried to ban email encryption back in 1991
There are rumors that the Obama campaign used an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, though further analysis seems to indicate that these images were fakes. It would be great if someone from the Obama…
1431
The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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The Berkeley Software Distribution
UNIX is always litigious
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The First Lisp Compiler
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
1435
Perfect example of real-life hacking
In 1999, UC-Davis civil engineer David Phillips was grocery shopping when he noticed something peculiar. Healthy Choice Foods was offering frequent-flyer miles to customers who bought its products. But a 25-cent pudding would bring 100 miles — the reward was worth more than the product itself. Recognizing a good…
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Why wasn't the steam engine invented earlier? Part II
As I noted in Part I, the general idea of using heat and steam for mechanical work had a long and continuous history back to ancient times. But when we talk of the breakthrough “steam engine” in the eighteenth-century sense, we don’t mean a machine that exploits steam’s expansive, or pushing force. We actually mean a…
1438
Perl is 26 Today
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
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So what's wrong with 1975 programming? (2008)
Vinyl Cache (formerly known as “Varnish Cache”) is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Vinyl Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300-1000×…
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2002: Last.fm and Audioscrobbler Herald the Social Web
Following in Amazon's footsteps, two student projects independently use 'collaborative filtering' to bring recommendations and social networking to online music; soon they will join forces.