Topics /
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
You might think it’s unlikely for any interesting mathematics to arise from incense appreciation, but that’s only because you’re unfamiliar with the peculiar character of Muromachi (室町) era Japanese nobles. There has never been a group of people, in any time or place, who were so driven to display their sophistication…
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
The dreams of a forgotten movement from the 1930s live on
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Mobile before iOS and Android
I started working full-time on what became Internet Explorer 1.0 in early October, 1994, grew the engineering team to 67 individuals by the time we shipped IE 3.0 in August, 1996, and got very litt…
I’ve always liked icons, make some occasionally for my personal use. I like especially old systems ones, from Mac OS Classic of course, but others too, Like BeOS, NeXTSTEP. Always found NeXTSTEP to have the most elegant interface of all, with that very sober windows and buttons style, yet beautifully detailed icons…
This post covers the design and creation of the Floppy8, a microcomputer and cartridge system which fits inside a floppy drive. To see it in action, checkout this video! The Floppy8 plays 4K movies and games on custom cartridges, features wireless controllers, status lights, motorized cartridge ejection and more! Simil
Manipulating and enhancing images may seem something that is particular to the current digital age. The Kattendijke Chronicle, a late fifteenth-century manuscript from the Low Countries, contains fascinating examples of analogue image editing.
I’ve been an active IRC users for nearly 25 years now, and for many of those years I was a denizen of the #a2c.chat channel on the irc.a2central.com IRC server. (IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, a channel-based internet text … Continue reading →
While programmers today take multiplication for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — multiplication r...
As I mentioned in my last post I’ve been working on reverse engineering the PLA chip in the C128. I’m now mostly done with this process so I think it’s time to share some of the findings.
This morning I had a chat with the students at Google's CAPE program. Since I wrote up what I wanted to say I figured I might as well blog ...
Recently listed as the number one worse place on the planet to take a short vacation, Stolipinovo is a shocking parallel world that defies belief.
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
Richard Sapper may not be a household name, but he's on the same level of greats like Dieter Rams and Jonathan Ive.
A seemingly frightening realization regularly dawns on various pundits these days: Being a digital native doesn't automatically mean you're computer savvy. Due to a gradual transformation from general purpose tools to digital appliances, computers are now more than ever perceived as magical boxes by their users. Many…
At long last, a real-world use case for AI!
The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as " Harmony ". It is due by the end of next year...
The story of a geeky twist on "Party like it's 1999".
What can it teach us?
Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west , I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I was showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210 , I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. It would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version …
