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A vacuum tube ROM?
Is such a thing possible? Turns out it is, and it’s called a Monoscope. I recently got a Raytheon CK1414 Monoscope with a good getter and a working filament–naturally, I decided to fire…
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 216 posts.
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Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
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Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
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Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
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Blender’s Prehistory – Traces on Commodore Amiga (1987-1991)
The following article is a historical look at the era that spawned first raytracers for home computers, a predecessor to Blender among them. Writing it was possible thanks to the fact, that, for the first time, the program and source code of said predecessor are publicly available.
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Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…
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A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
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The printer that wouldn't print: Fixing an IBM 1401 mainframe from the 1960s
The Computer History Museum has two operational IBM 1401 computers used for demos , but a few weeks ago one computer suddenly couldn't prin...
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Why does the Zune HD have the message “For our Princess” inside of the case?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed, dominate world today
(Adapted from a Quora answer .) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 mode.…
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What Made Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem Hard to Prove
Roughly speaking, Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem states that there are true mathematical statements that cannot be proven. When I was in 11-th grade, my geometry teacher Mr. Olsen, my friend …
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The World’s Loudest Sound (2014)
The sound made by the Krakatoa volcanic eruption in 1883 was so loud it ruptured eardrums of people 40 miles away, travelled around the world four times, and wa
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Building the Commodore computer that should have existed
Last month, the 100,000th hardware engineer registered on SnapEDA, so I thought it would be fun to reach out to learn more about what they were working on. Little did I know that it would turn out to be so epic!
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Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine
**Russian ALFA Class interceptor submarine** At the height of the Cold War NATO submariners found themselves confronting a Soviet submarine which not only greatly out-performed their own boats, but which could operate beyond the reach of their weapons… Read More >….
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Commodore 64 BASIC inside a USB Connector
Tomu is a super cheap Open Source Hardware 24 MHz ARM computer with 8 KB of RAM and 64 KB of ROM that fits into your USB connector! Of course I had to put Commodore 64 BASIC on it, which can be accessed through the USB-Serial port exposed by the device.
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Duckspeak vs. Smalltalk: Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple (2011)
Duckspeak Vs Smalltalk The Decline of the Xerox PARC Philosophy at Apple Computers Malcolm Gladwell's recent piece, "Creation Myth" , in...
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Intel’s Chipped Chips
Typically when collecting something, be it coins, cars or CPU’s having the most pristine unblemished example is highly desirable. However, sometimes, the best example is one that isn’t perfect, in coin collecting it may be a rare double struck coin, or some other flaw that actually makes the coin more valuable.
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Programming War Stories: Connectix
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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Nixie-clock using neon lamps as logic (2017)
The above shows my home-built digital clock. It uses Nixie-tubes for readout. In contrast to most other nixie-clocks being built these days, my clock does not use any transistor or IC for driving the tubes. Instead, the driving logic is built from neon lamps , together with resistors, capacitors and silicon diodes.
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The Eudora Email Client Source Code
Electronic mail is one of “killer apps” of networked computing. The ability to quickly send and receive messages without having to be online at the same time created a new form of human communication. By now billions of people have used email.
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Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine (2001)
Lisp Machine Inc. K-machine architecture
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Antique BeOS Content by Scot Hacker (2011)
In late 2002, Byte.com decided to combat falling ad revenue by charging admission to its archives of computing content. I have first-hand experience tring to harvest enough revenue from the Internet to pay operating costs, and fully support Byte's decision to move to a subscription model. However, my BeView columns on…
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The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC
SOLVED: The last known unidentified marking on the Saturn V S-IC. For a hair over twenty years, I have been chasing the markings on the ...
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