Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
By good luck we have been able to make an emergency landing on this uninhabited space station. There have been no casualties. We all count ourselves fortunate to have found safe haven at a moment when the expedition was clearly set on disaster.
I’d be quite content if I never again heard the Intel “bong” at the end of every PC ad.
[This post is part of “A Bicycle for the Mind.” The complete series can be found here.] From 1975 through early 1977, the use of personal computers remained almost exclusively the province of …
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2021 was awarded jointly to Benjamin List and David W.C. MacMillan "for the development of asymmetric organocatalysis"
One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before.
This generated a lot of lively discussion on twitter and /r/c64 . A bunch of people were curious as to how it works and I promised to explain it on my blog.
Learn chess openings and variations online by repeating the most popular chess Master moves
In the Apollo Moon missions, the Saturn V rocket was guided by an advanced onboard computer system built by IBM. This system was built fro...
AdGuard dives into the history of ad blocking, from the very first banner on the web to present days, and we even have a peek into the future of ads and ad blockers. Let's look back together to better understand what awaits us ahead.
How is history used to support ideology? Is violence by a government against its own civilian population ever justified? Why are certain events given priority over others in history books? This les…
At a glance comparison of every major Explorer release
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
You've probably seen these dotted around a few places, what looks like some sort of security barrier, but wondered how such an odd thing could work.
Link to: https://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=23765914&cid=65583466
A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history. For most of them, we have pretty good guesses who ran them and for what purpose. One example is the Gongs and Chimes Station , known for its melody that got increasingly creepy over the years, the more…
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...
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…
