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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.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?
Here’s a question for you. When did Alan Partridge first appear on television? Caveats: a) I specifically mean television. Radio is brilliant, and also outside the scope of this article. b) F…
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The machines of Tatjana van Vark
Building scientific instruments from the past, along with other technical projects.
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The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021)
In this long article, I, being as far as I know the first outside Microsoft to have learnt how the AARD code works, explain that I condemn its form but broadly sympathise with its function.
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Wii Architecture – A Practical Analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
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Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
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Amiga ASCII Art
My thesis on Amiga ASCII art translated to English.
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Lisping at JPL Revisited
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...
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Shining a light on the digital dark age
Without maintenance, most digital information will be lost in just a few decades. How might we secure our data so that it survives for generations?
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BSD on Windows: Things I wish I knew existed
It’s 1995 and I’ve been nearly two years in the professional workspace. OS/2 is the dominant workstation product, Netware servers rule the world, and the year of the Linux desktop is going to happen any moment now. If you weren’t running OS/2, you were probably running Windows 3.1, only very few people were using that…
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The Galaga no-fire-cheat mystery (2012)
My personal website and blog
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The Disappearance of the Ashtray
These things used to be pieces of furniture
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The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
The archives of declassified foreign relations documents from the United States, China and other countries can give us some insights. I’ve enjoyed reading some of the documents in Wilson Cent…
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Red Hat 30th anniversary
To help us celebrate three decades of open source innovation, State of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper declared March 26, 2023, as Red Hat Day across North Carolina.
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Leonardo da Vinci’s experiments explored gravity as a form of acceleration
A new look at da Vinci’s papers reveals his insightful attempts to probe the nature of gravity 500 years ago
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20 Years of Vim
The hard work from maintainers turned Vim into a completely new editor, while still maintaining its spirit.
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Everything I know about floppy disks
Floppy disk drives are curious things. We know them as the slots that ingest those small almost-square plastic "floppy disks" and we only really see them now in Computer Museums. But there's a lot going on in that humble square of plastic and I wanted to write down what I've learned so far.
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Apple's interactive television box: Hacking the set top box System 7.1 in ROM
This article has been revised with recollections and corrections from former Apple employee Al Kossow, some good folks on Hacker News and t...
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Idle DR-DOS
I have a laptop. Sometimes I run VMs on it, and some of those VMs run DOS. When a DOS VM does not have any power management, the laptop quickly lets me know by kicking up the fan speed. It is Very Annoying . So annoying that I really want to avoid the situation.
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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’.
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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.
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Tomb Raider
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!
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Celebrating the first NES Tetris game crash
Blue Scuti made history, breaking NES Tetris in a way that was previously only theoretical. Here is a glimpse into the what, who, and how.
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The Irish Logarithm
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus