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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Many classic Macs came with — or supported — displays running at 512x384 pixels, but many compact Macs, ranging from the original 1984 machine up through 1991’s Macintosh Classic II had built-in CRTs running at 512x342 pixels. That covers all black-and-white compact Macs with a 9-inch screen. The later Color Classic…
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
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...
Stephen Wolfram shares memories of Doug Lenat, early AI pioneer and developer of the CYC system. Their discussions around AI & logic and the potential combined uses of their respective discoveries.
3.6.2 is a general patch release. It includes a large number of fixes to the 3.6.1 version, beyond the Windows issue fixed at the time of that release.
TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the...
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems te…
Updated May 10, 2021: Hey there friend! This ever-green blog is gold – just like reaktorians. If you’re reading this, you might be one of us. The30th
Stephen Wolfram describes his friendship and shared interest in computation with the late Marvin Minsky, pioneer of computation and AI.
The most controversial and confronting of the many categories of Afghan “war carpets” made since the Soviet invasion in 1979 were those which first appeared in early 2002 and which memorialized the…
Gosper's Glider Gun in Conway's Game of Life I'd known of Conway since my early teens. I remember reading about his Game of Life in an old Scientific American someone gave me. The article (a quick search tells me) was published in October 1970, so I'm guessing I saw it in the early 70s, perhaps 1972. I was hooked.
Nuclear strategy is one part cold logic, one part emotional terror.
Instead, it uses Fossil as a version control system. Some thoughts.
Background
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
The PNG image file format has been created in 1995 as a response to some patent issues around the then-prevailing GIF format. PNG has gained popularity ever since, and it is now used on more websites than GIF.
We approached games as immersive simulations. We wanted to build game environments that reacted to player’s decisions, that behaved in natural ways, and where players had more verbs than simply “shoot.” DOOM was not an influence on System Shock. We were trying something more difficult and nuanced, [although] we still…
When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most.
Someone has to break it to you, and that person is me. It’s over. You waited too long. You procrastinated or made excuses or otherwise didn’t think about it or care. You didn’t do…
My diplomatic life true revealing stories behind the hype is a story that takes the sheen off the perception of a glamorous and privileged lifestyle.
Wettbewerb um die ultimative Mindestanforderung für Windows XP zu finden.
I’ve been idly looking for one of the mid-90s ThinkPads known to have perfect OpenStep/Rhapsody support for years as a fun collector piece, but been unwilling to pay eBay prices. The other week I scored a pristine IBM ThinkPad 560E for $20 in a Shopgoodwill auction, below is notes on getting it up and running, plus…
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…
