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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Here is a link to full schematics. Thanks to whoever made this. I just found a few issues with it. The CLK input to the 7474 on page 2 should be HRESET, not CLK. Pin 5 of the 555's on pages 5 and 6 should be connected to the capacitor. Also some of the nodes are inconsistently labeled.
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
Three years ago I came across an interesting paper written up by a Microsoft employee, Kent Sullivan, on the process and findings of designing the new user interface for Windows 95. The web page ha…
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 24, 2017, at the Front Trends conference in Warsaw.
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
The second block has more real work going on. If the character stored in the variable _ does not match the first character of the string a , the code recurses in such a way that this same block of code will again be entered. That is, t=-65 forces a return to the if (t < -50) block. The recursion steps through string a…
As you may know, as of the time this text is being written youtube-dl’s repository at GitHub is blocked due to a DMCA takedown letter received by GitHub on behalf of the RIAA. While I cannot comment on the current maintainers' plans or ongoing discussions, in light of the claims made in that letter I thought it would…
In the beginning there was NCSA Mosaic , and Mosaic called itself NCSA_Mosaic/2.0 (Windows 3.1) , and Mosaic displayed pictures along with text, and there was much rejoicing.
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it , and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my…
If my gravestone says, “Sid Meier, developed Civilization,” I’m happy with that. It’s a game I’m happy to be known for.
On today's show, I'm talking to Richard Hipp about surviving becoming core infrastructure for the world. SQLite is everywhere. It's in your web browser, it's in your phone, it's probably in your car, and it's definitely in commercial planes. It's where your iMessages and WhatsApp messages are stored, and if you do a…
One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors".
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine.
In early 1982, the Lisa software team was trying to buckle down for the big push to ship the software within the next six months. Some of the managers decided that it would be a good idea to track the progress of each individual engineer in terms of the amount of code that they wrote from week to week. They devised a…
It sounds made up. In the wilderness of British Columbia, a two hour drive from any town with cell reception, sits a ghost town. Not only a ghost town, but a ghost town that was built for $50…
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
