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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Dedication asks each of its adherents to have faith even as time and energy pass through from one year to the next. Dedication brings with it a variety of challenges, but also rewards. Dedication is something most people claim to have, but few …
This time we will talk about one unique Intel processor, which did not appear on the retail market and whose reviews you will not find on the Internet. This processor was produced purely by special order for one well-known manufacturer of computer equipment. Also in the framework of this article I will try to assemble…
In 1998, I was a junior Program Manager on the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft. My first project was shipping Internet Explorer 4 Plus, a CD-ROM with Internet Explorer 4.0 and a whole lot of tr…
In communist Czechoslovakia, a network of teenage hackers discovers that text games are a completely uncensored medium.
Oberon, the jewel by Niklaus Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht: Operating System, Compiler and Computer.
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
Today I'll stop my 3rd person perspective . I'm going to write a little bit more about what I do to help MacBU ship great software and provide some color around what's it's like to work on Mac software at Microsoft. Often when we have press events or special visits from our MVPs I'll give them a tour of the Mac Lab…
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
Our seventh-grade class was led into a room full of brand-new Macintosh Performas . The day's lesson was a crash course in the use of an uncomplicated yet marvelous program. With it, one might persuade a computer to do anything and everything - or so it seemed to a child with the attention span to appreciate the…
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
Back in 2008, Sequoia Capital shared with its portfolio companies tips for surviving the economic downturn. Here's the original RIP Good Times presentation.
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
[10 Nov 2012] Help us to release Wheezy : participate to our BSP marathon [29 Sep 2012] Updated Debian 6.0: 6.0.6 released [16 Aug 2012] Debian Community celebrates its 19th birthday [13 Aug 2012] Organize a Debian Birthday party in your city [10 Aug 2012] Help the Debian Installer team: test the new version of the…
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
The Battleship is one of the most glorious, evocative and ultimately useless machines ever created by human beings. They’re fast: in their heyday of displacement speed vessels, they were the …
Archaeologist Genevieve von Petzinger has made an incredible discovery.
A day has 24 hours in it. That's 1,440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. If you wonder why Americans don't understand the need for using the metric system then ask yourself why you use this inconsistent time measurement system.
If you have to stare at someone’s bum, it’s far better to look at a nice female bum than a bloke’s bum!
I just stumbled across this old story I told somewhere, and thought I’d share more widely.
When the best-loved makers of text adventures met the best-loved sci-fi satirist of the decade, the result was an unforgettable classic of interactive fiction.
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
