1531
Who Invented Backpropagation?
Its modern version (the reverse mode of automatic differentiation) was first published in 1970 by Seppo Linnainmaa
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
1532
Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
1533
1534
How Apple's developers reflashed Mac ROMs in the '90s
After I wrote about the possibility of programmable Mac ROM SIMMs in Quadras a couple of months ago, I suspected that there had been a way for developers at Apple in the 68k Mac era to reflash the ROM in their Macs during development, just like BIOS updates on PCs. The reason I believed this is because the ROM SIMM…
1535
1536
1537
Ten years of PyPy
From a software engineering perspective, 10 years is indistinguishable from infinity, so I don't care what happens 10 years from now -- as...
1538
1539
What Killed Perl?
Trick question! Perl is not dead. I’ll show you what I mean, and then still answer what I think killed Perl.
1540
Is AM radio dead?
...that was the question I asked my Dad, a radio engineer for many decades, who worked at the biggest AM station in St. Louis, KMOX. The station is approaching its centennial in 2025, as are—some YouTube commenters argue—its primary audience! I recorded that video during my convalescence at my parents' house (I am…
1541
The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
1542
Lewis Carroll – computing the day of the week for any given date (1887)
A letter from Lewis Carroll to Nature, March 31, 1887: Having hit upon the following method of mentally computing the day of the week for any given date, I send it you in the hope that it may interest some of your readers. I am not a rapid computer myself, and as I find my average time for doing any such question is…
1543
Australia's weird little time zone (2008)
One tiny corner of Australia recognises "Australian Central Western Standard Time" (ACWST), an unofficial zone based on the quarter hour.
1544
Raster CRT Typography According to DEC
A closer look at the glyphs drawn by the DEC terminals VT100 and VT220.
1545
Jeri Ellsworth and the Robot Uprising of 2038
In a stuffed apartment filled with hydrofluoric acid, oscilloscopes and a transistor curve tracer, Jeri Ellsworth carefully places a hand-cut silicon wafer into a 1000 degree furnace. The ambient noise of police sirens can be heard in the background: "Ugh, the police are coming... So the instructions for the…
1546
3Hz Computer, Hold the Transistors
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II , a mechanical digital 1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.
1547
The Mystery of 355/113 (2010)
Today's date is a good excuse to memorize a few more digits of 3.1415926 53589793 23846264 33832795....
1548
Japanese symbols that speak without words
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
1549
Modern Linux in an ancient PC
What is the oldest x86 processor that is still supported by a modern Linux kernel in present time? I asked the above quiz question during the Geekcamp tech conference in Nov 2017 during my emcee role. The theoretical answer as you can glean from the title of this post is the 486 which was first released in 1989. I…
1550
90-year-old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, says NSA
The National Security Agency is withholding 90-year-old information on early American cryptanalytic efforts against Russia and the Soviet Union from a 20-year-old document on the grounds that relea…
1551
Rijksmuseum to Stage the Largest Vermeer Exhibition in 2023
In the spring of 2023, the Rijksmuseum, the national museum of the Netherlands, will dedicate a retrospective exhibition to the 17th-century master Johannes Vermeer for the first time in its history. With loans from all over the world, this promises to be the largest Vermeer exhibition ever. The Rijksmuseum itself has…
1552
Found a program I wrote in 1981 and decided to bring it back to life
When you find a weird program from four decades ago and realize that it's yours.
1553
1554
1555
A scientist stole my root beer
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
1556
Wil Shipley: My “Doom” 20th Anniversary Stories
The way I got into the software business (besides learning to code) was to use every piece of software I could find and send the developers ...
1557
1558
Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)
Can history help us make sense of the term 'RESTful API'?
1559
1560