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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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Silicon die analysis: inside an op amp with interesting “butterfly” transistors
Some integrated circuits have very interesting dies under a microscope, like the chip below with designs that look kind of like butterflies....
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Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
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History of Symbolics Lisp Machines (2007)
Richard Stallman has been telling a story about the origins of the Lisp machine companies, and the effects on the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab, for many years. He has published it in a book, and in a widely-referenced paper, which you can find at http://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html .
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The Japanese Calendar’s Y2K Moment
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
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Running BBS Door Games on Windows 10 with GameSrv and DOSBox
I continue to enjoy seeing what can be done with WSL (Windows Subsystem for ...
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How the Sears Catalog Undermined White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South
Sears has filed for bankruptcy protection and plans to close hundreds of stores in an effort to keep the company afloat. The Sears catalog is perhaps one of the
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Ken and Roberta (2011)
There are two prototypical kinds of “computer professionals” in the world. First there are the purist hackers, who dive into the depths of circuits, operating systems, and programming languages like explorers discovering new lands; it wasn’t by chance that away from the computer Will Crowther was a caver, nor that he…
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Apollo 11 and Other Screw-Ups
(A paper presented to the 27th annual Guidance and Control Conference of the American Astronautical Society (AAS), in Breckenridge, Colorado on February 6, 2004, and designated AAS 04-064. This version includes additional illustrations and comments, and several minor corrections.)
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An abandoned lifeboat at world’s end (2011)
Breaking news: a credible solution to the Bouvet Island lifeboat mystery has been found. See comments for 22-27 May 2011, 12 November 2011, 17-20 March & 9 April 2016, and 28 December 2023. The…
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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
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Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
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Undershoot: Parsing theory in 1965
Jeffrey Kegler's blog about Marpa, his new parsing algorithm, and other topics of interest
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Fifteen Years of Fedora
Read this Magazine article to learn about the history of Fedora, the original Fedora Core 1 release, and how much has changed over 15 years.
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Doing Windows, Part 2: From Interface Manager to Windows
Bill Gates was as aware as everyone else of the abundant deficiencies of his own company’s hastily procured operating system for the IBM PC. So, in September of 1981, before the PC had even shipped and just a handful of months after VisiCorp had started their own similar project , he initiated work at Microsoft on a…
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The Construction of a Yurt (1995)
[ed note: this article is also available in pdf and postscript and as a Microsoft Word document . ]
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Robert and Virginia Heinlein's Colorado Springs House
Socolive là địa chỉ được nhiều người hâm mộ bóng đá tìm đến khi muốn cập nhật và theo dõi trực tiếp bóng đá trên nền tảng trực tuyến. Nội dung tại Socolive được xây dựng xoay quanh nhiều giải đấu và cuộc đối đầu đáng chú ý, giúp người xem dễ dàng tìm thấy trận đấu đang được quan tâm. Cách phân loại thông tin theo từng…
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Myth Busting Banksy
The recent incident around Banksy embedding a shredder into the frame of his Girl With A Balloon has caught the world’s attention. As a nerd obsessed with the intersection of art and tech, I too was sucked in over the weekend in trying to unravel the mysteries behind Banksy’s self-shredding paint
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Quest for Glory III and IV
The VGA remake of Quest for Glory I . By this point, Sierra’s graphics exceeded the quality of most Saturday-morning cartoons, and weren’t far off the standard set by feature films, being held back more by the technical limitations of VGA graphics than those of the artists doing the drawing.
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The KK Computer: A Radical 6502 Redesign
The main feature is fast access to a flat, 24-bit address space. Although there are many ways to retrofit a 'C02 with expanded memory, AFAIK none can touch this implementation for speed. Given any random address in the 16 megabyte space, KK can fetch that byte in 6-8 cyles. It's fast because:
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MacPaint and QuickDraw Source Code (2010)
The Apple Macintosh combined brilliant design in hardware and in software. The drawing program MacPaint, which was released with the computer in January of 1984, was an example of that brilliance both in what it did, and in how it was implemented.
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