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The Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (2023)
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
1622
Recreating the THX Deep Note (2009)
We dissect the building blocks of the infamous THX Deep Sound and recreate it by synthesizing the sound in Supercollider programming environment.
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APL deserves its renaissance too (2018)
APL tutorial explaining the meaning of life←{↑1 ⍵∨.∧3 4=+/,¯1 0 1∘.⊖¯1 0 1∘.⌽⊂⍵}
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Superfest – The almost unbreakable East German Glass (2021)
Originally named ceverit, Superfest was an extremely durable glass patented and developed in 1979 in East Germany to combat excessive glass waste.
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Arabian Nights
“It hath reached me, O King of the Age, that there dwelt in a city of the cities of China a man which was a tailor, withal a pauper, and he had one son, Alaeddin hight. Now this boy had been from h…
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Remembering the LAN
I started programming in the 1990s living above my parent's medical practice. We had 15 PCs for the business, and one for me. The standard OS was MS-DOS. The network started off using IPX over coax to a Novell Netware server, the fanciest software we ever owned. IPX was so much easier than TCP/IP. No DHCP and address…
1628
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.
1629
Ethiopian Binary Math
Today, a witch doctor practices computer arithmetic. The University of Houston's College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them. The scene is a remote Ethiopian village in 1940. A Farmer offers his herd of 34 goats for sale…
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A History of the TTY
It's one of those anachronisms that is deeply embedded in modern technology. From cloud operator servers to embedded controllers in appliances, there must be uncountable devices that think they are connected to a TTY.
1631
When did New York start building slowly?
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
1632
Intel 486 CPU announced April 10, 1989
The killer app for the 486 didn't come out until a year or so later
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The Deep Insights of Alan Kay
If you haven’t heard of Alan Kay you’ll likley have heard one of his many famous quotes, the most popular, likely his 1971 gem: The best …
1635
FreeBSD Celebrates 25th Anniversary
Join us to celebrate FreeBSD Day! FreeBSD Day, celebrated on June 19, commemorates the launch of the FreeBSD open source operating system and recognizes its pioneering and continued impact on technology. On June 19, 1993, an email thread on an early BSD list proposed project names for a new open source UNIX…
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The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
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Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
1638
Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released
The C64 conversion of Prince of Persia, based on the original Apple II code by Jordan Mechner has been released today. It requires a Commod...
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The Woman Behind Apple's First Icons
In the early 80s, Susan Kare was a pixel art pioneer at Apple. Today, she continues to dazzle.
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The Long Way Round (2014)
The morning of 6th January 1942 was a going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the controller manning LaGuardia’s airport’s tower, but it meant he’d have to remember to wrap up extra warm when he headed home.
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The Development of the C Language (2003)
C came into being in the years 1969-1973, in parallel with the early development of the Unix operating system; the most creative period occurred during 1972. Another spate of changes peaked between 1977 and 1979, when portability of the Unix system was being demonstrated. In the middle of this second period, the first…
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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:
1646
Lisp in Space
Have you ever had a unique approach to a problem and been excited to use it, but you're met with skepticism? Today's story: what happens if you take someone who's passionate about LISP and put them in an organization where that's just not how they write software. Today's story is about getting LISP into space. The…
1647
The Size of Adobe Reader Installers Through the Years
At the time of writing, the most recent Adobe Reader 25.x.y.z 64-bit installer for Windows 11 weights 687,230,424 bytes . After installation, the program includes 'AI' (of course), an auto-updater, sprinkled ads for Acrobat online services everywhere, and 2 GUIs: 'new' and 'old'.
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The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
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The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology
Because Nvidia became one of the most valuable companies in the world, there are now two books explaining its rise and extolling the geniu...
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