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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
1862
Testing DVD-R and CD-R 25 years later: optical disks from Japan
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
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Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue
Why we need to revisit the origin of blue hyperlink While musing over my recently published article, Why are hyperlinks blue, I was left feeling a bit blue
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Betrayal at Krondor
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game . These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm…
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I Want Your AOL CDs
Yes, yes I do. As you might expect, someone who does a lot of something (collecting) like I do, in a pretty public fashion, tends to get some pretty shiny-polished chestnuts tossed over the fence. …
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Hitler Uses Docker, Annotated
If you haven’t seen it, this is a very accurate and smart Downfall satire on Docker’s ecosystem, technology, and culture. It’s so good that I thought it would be instructive to an…
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Inside NASA’s Mysterious Rubber Room
Ever since learning about the Rubber Room and Blast Room deep below launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center I had been hopeful that I would one day get to photograph this mysterious remnant of the A…
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Lost C64 Games: Daffy Duck – 1992 Hi-Tec
Cancelled & Unreleased Video Games
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Patent 5,893,120 reduced to mathematical formulae
I have previously argued that the Bilski ruling renders all software unpatentable in the US because any method of manipulating information ...
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Trolls convinced journalists they were “abortion bounty hunters”
And other misadventures
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What would happen if computers never got any faster?
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech…
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History of the Nautilus loudspeaker
Nautilus is all that and more. Despite being almost 30 years old, this remarkable loudspeaker can still turn heads and win hearts.
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A History of .NET Runtimes
Recently I was fortunate enough to chat with Chris Bacon who wrote DotNetAnywhere (an alternative .NET Runtime) and I quipped with him:
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When the CIA got away with building a heart attack gun
How 16 Senators Accidentally Saved Democracy (Then Watched It Die)
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Universal Paperclips
The dawn of incremental games: how some of the most virally addictive games of the 2010s were nothing but text and numbers going up.
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Reviving Classic Unix Games: A 20-Year Journey Through Software Archaeology
How I spent two decades tracking down the creators of a 1987 USENET game and learned modern packaging tools in the process. The Discovery: A Digital Time Capsule from 1987 Picture this: October 26, 1987.
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An Introduction to the WARC File (2021)
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 .
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Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
Well, somebody had to find it.
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Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem
In this three-part series (I, II, III) we’re going to be bowing to reader demand and taking a close look at the nuts and bolts of maintaining an army in the field. In our last series, after all, w…
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Google was incorporated 25 years ago on September 4 1998
Find out where it all began. Read the history of how Google has grown since Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded the company in 1998.
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The x86 architecture is the weirdo, part 2
It does everything differently, because of course it does.
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Silicon Valley Tea Party a.k.a. the great 1998 Linux revolt take II (1999)
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…
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Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
The full story of the 2021 ditching of a Boeing 737 cargo plane off Honolulu.
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“I survived the TCP transition” (2013)
This year we invited Vint Cerf to tell the story.