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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 326 posts.
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Knuth reward check
Twenty years ago I got a reward check from Donald Knuth.
123
Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
Explained by a former Sony engineer
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Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
Tove Jansson illustrated books of other appreciated authors during her career. One of them was J. R. R. Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.
125
Don't you mean extinct?
In 1993, Jurassic Park came out and revolutionized the use of CGI in films [1] . To the public the experience was magic. But for some of the people in the movie industry, it was a rude awakening.
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New copy of earliest poem in English, written 1,3k years ago, discovered in Rome
Old fashioned sleuthing and the help of modern technology leads to discovery of manuscript with poem composed by a farm labourer 1,300 years ago.
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F/OSS Comics #13: BSD Unix, Part 3 – The Beginning of BSD Unix
From Pascal and ex tapes to a VAX system: Bill Joy handles BSD distribution and debugging, then joins Ozalp Babaoglu to bring virtual memory to Unix.
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Computer Hobby Movement in Canada
The York University Computer Museum (YUCoM) is a historical collection and a research center for the history of computing in Canada. Computer museum Canada
129
My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
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Alternate clock designs and time systems
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.
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Laptop Based on 6502 CPU
Gauntlet now has a case, it's 3D printed and there's a few bits I need to adjust, but for a first go I'm really pleased…
132
MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco
I went to San Francisco for Muni Heritage Weekend 2026! I stood by the tracks for three hours with my line scan camera, scanning trams.
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The Origin Story of Kid Pix
The history of Kid Pix by Craig Hickman
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How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?
Asking nicely, and asking a lot of people.
135
Japanese symbols that speak without words
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
136
Infinite Mac: BeOS
tl;dr: You can now run many BeOS versions in the browser at Infinite Mac , my site where you can experience the Macintosh Cinematic Universe from 1984 to 2005. The installs are full peers to their Mac cousins: you can boot them instantly (large disks are streamed in), play around with pre-installed software from…
137
Pre-Greek: The lost language hidden within Ancient Greek
Around 1,000 Greek words can’t be traced to any Indo-European language. Where do they come from?
138
Profession by Isaac Asimov (1957)
Profession , copyright ©1957 by Street and Smith Publications, Inc., from ISAAC ASIMOV: THE COMPLETE STORIES OF VOL. 1 by Isaac Asimov. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet Web site at…
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Matrox: Graphics for Professionals
Graphics for Professionals
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Lotus 1-2-3 on the PC with DOS
VisiCalc started it, but 1-2-3 finished it. "It" being the discussion of what a spreadsheet can be, and also VisiCalc itself.
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Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
142
Increasing the lifespan of a bulb makes it worse in every other way
This isn't quite right , but it's the type of wrong that cites its sources and hides in the part you'd never think to fact check:
143
Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.
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How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
When Japan broke up its national railway in 1987, the new companies agreed on one thing to keep the same.
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Computer History Museum Launches Digital Portal to Its Collection
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – January 21, 2026 – The Computer History Museum (CHM), a leader in decoding technology—its computing past, digital present, and future impact on humanity—announced the launch of OpenCHM, a new digital portal providing global access to its unparalleled collection. “OpenCHM is designed to inspire…
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Max Payne – two decades later – Graphics Critique (2021)
It has been two decades since the video game Max Payne was release on July 23, 2001. The game itself was some incredible homage to The Ma...
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Sandia National Labs SA3000 8085 CPU
Back in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s Sandia National Laboratory (in Albuquerque NM USA) began building the capacity to design, fab, and test IC’s at scale (packaging was handled by Fairchild and Allied Signal). Why would a National Laboratory need the capacity to do this? To provide components that were not…
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Copy That Floppy – Cambridge guide for preserving data from fragile floppy disks
This guide is written for practitioners wanting to create disk images of floppy disks with the intention of preserving them for the long-term. This guide will focus on 8-inch, 5.25-inch, 3.5-inch and 3-inch floppy disks and will only focus on getting material from these disks and will not cover writing disks. Other…
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The Computer at the Bottom of a Canal
Somewhere at the bottom of the Forth and Clyde Canal, buried in the silt, there is a box of custom silicon that was right about almost everything. Back in 1988 a Scottish hi-fi company shipped a processor that checked the type and bounds of every memory access in hardware, garbage-collected its own heap in silicon, […]