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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
Originally named ceverit, Superfest was an extremely durable glass patented and developed in 1979 in East Germany to combat excessive glass waste.
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.
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…
Learn chess openings and variations online by repeating the most popular chess Master moves
America: The Ultimate Crammer
In August I finished work on a game called Restricted Airspace for the Wonderbundle, a bundle of new games by NYC game designers available as a reward to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter . It is a 3rd person aerial shooter in the style of the original Star Fox set in a city modeled on Beirut in the 1890s. It was…
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
Every collector has that machine, the machine they sunk so much time and, often, money into that they would have defenestrated it years ago...
When we left Richard Garriott, California Pacific had just released his first game, Akalabeth , a substantial windfall for the 19-year-old university student. In between classes and SCA events, he spent his sophomore year at the University of Texas writing a new, much more ambitious game, which CP published just as…
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
Look, here's the thing, I don't like mysteries that involve technology. I think I hate them because I know that some other human created the...
Learn more about the early days of LAN.
By Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, co-authors A MIND AT PLAY: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age “Do you mind if I hang you upside down by your legs?” From any other professor, this question might have elicited concern. But from Claude Shannon, it was par for the course. Shannon had in mind an elaborate…
It basically falls under the de minimis rule.
A scene from the Amiga game Defender of the Crown, released in 1986. For years, no other home computer came close to screens like these.
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
Want to know more about a tool in our web archiving toolbox? Your suggestions or questions for future posts about Archive-It technology are very welcome here .
Anyway, here's what happened: Not to say that big brother is everywhere, but short of having microsoft people monitoring our lists and newsgroups (with wouldn't overly surprise me, after all they also tried a PR compain with magazines, posing as simple users who liked microsoft products), the announcement was…
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports , I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
In July 2023 I was reminiscing about a thing of the past, large-scale public LAN parties. I remember them being a semiregular occurrence around Tasmania, only attending a couple in my young age before they disappeared. I wondered if I could find some photos of these events to help the memories come back clearer. After…
This week brings sad news for our Duxbury Systems family. Our colleague, David Holladay, passed away in a hospital on Thursday, February 15th, following an accident at home that morning. David was a cancer survivor and valiantly battled multiple medical problems over his last five years.
After 40 years, the Atari 2600 masterpiece Tarzan has been unearthed.
