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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 143 posts.
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Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
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Bill Tutte – The Lesser Known Codebreaker of Bletchley Park
The work of Bletchley Park during the Second World War is inspirational-numerous codes were broken and incalculable lives were saved. It is important to remember that code breaking at Bletchley Par…
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The Birth of Standard Error
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
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The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
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The Rest of the Lenna Story
Home Page for Charles Rosenberg
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Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…
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Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
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Experimenting with QUIC
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The SPDY protocol , which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, i...
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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research
I gave a brief talk last night at the Mozilla Research Party (first of a series), which happened to fall on the virtual (public, post-Easter-holiday) celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary .
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Inside the ALU of the 8085 microprocessor
The arithmetic-logic unit is a fundamental part of any computer, performing addition, subtraction, and logic operations, but how it works i...
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NetBSD turns 20
On this page you will find a summary of significant changes to NetBSD. For those interested in every change to the source tree, there is no substitute for subscribing to the source-changes mailing list. Significant news related to the NetBSD Project is also included here. Changes to pkgsrc are also listed here. All of…
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The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)
[This file, jargon.txt, was maintained on MIT-AI for many years, before being published by Guy Steele and others as the Hacker's Dictionary. Many years after the original book went out of print, Eric Raymond picked it up, updated it and republished it as the New Hacker's Dictionary. Unfortunately, in the process, he…
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Quote Origin: Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
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Quote Origin: Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal
Steve Jobs? Pablo Picasso? T. S. Eliot? W. H. Davenport Adams? Lionel Trilling? Igor Stravinsky? William Faulkner? Apocryphal?
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Tim Berners-Lee: WorldWideWeb, the first Web client
The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).
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DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.