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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 233 posts.
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An oral history of the AIM away message
Speed up product development from ideation to launch. Align teams, break tool silos and ship what customers need in one AI-powered visual platform.
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Atari Centipede’s Hidden Code Trap
During the peak of Atari’s success, one of the more unlikely tasks given to some of its coin-operated programmers, was to analyse potentially pirated versions of their games. This week, I tho…
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Cartoons in Tektronix Schematics
Explore Tektronix schematic cartoons with vintageTEK. Discover hidden humorous drawings in manuals and schematics from classic Tektronix gear.
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Life Off the Grid, Part 2: Playing Ultima Underworld
I rarely play or even see current games; the demands of this historical project of mine simply don’t allow for it. Thankfully, though, being a virtual time traveler does have its advantages. Just when I’m starting to feel a little sorry for myself, having heard about some cool new release I just don’t have time for, I…
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Ilya Starinov – The godfather of modern insurgent IED warfare
I’ve been researching for this post for quite a while and of necessity it’s going to be my longest post. Ilya Starinov is arguably the most important person in the history of IEDs and in…
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Remembering a Programming Language That Helped Shape the Digital New York Times
It started as a program to add reader usernames, but quickly became the language powering The Times’s website.
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The Origin of Banking (2016)
There is a just-so story that explains the existence of money. Before money, the story goes, we all had to barter for the goods we wanted. If I wanted wheat and had chickens, I needed to find someone who wanted chickens and had extra wheat. Money solves this “double coincidence” problem by letting me sell my chickens…
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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
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Fukushima 8 years on – photo essay
Fukushima 8 years on
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The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
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IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
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Remembering Murray Gell-Mann
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of Murray Gell-Mann, leader in particle physics and Nobel Prize winner. Observations from years together in Caltech’s physics department and a selection of Gell-Mann’s contributions to physics.
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Origin Sells Out
One day in early June of 1992, a group of executives from Electronic Arts visited Origin Systems’s headquarters in Austin, Texas. If they had come from any other company, the rank and file at Origin might not have paid them much attention. As it was, though, the visit felt a bit like Saddam Hussein dropping in at…
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The Apollo 11 Moon Landing: Spacecraft Design Then and Now
To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, we revisit a first-hand account of designing the Lunar Module digital autopilot, and compare the approach used then with the way it could be done today.
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Why Didn’t Denmark Sell Greenland?
Exercise in pointing out the obvious: Greenland has been, is, and will be indefinitely, a white elephant. Denmark turned down 100m USD from the USA in 1946; I discuss how this was a bad idea—America got what it needed anyway while Denmark kept control of a loser.
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Put 1.7MB onto 1.44MB Floppies (1999)
How to create 1.7-Mbyte MDF floppies with GRDuw Windows shareware or Linux. Now add DNS server and full DHCP to floppy-bootable Linux.
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Reverse-engineering precision op amps from a 1969 analog computer
We are restoring a vintage 1 computer that CuriousMarc recently obtained. Analog computers were formerly popular for fast scientific compu...
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Pac-Man: How We Played the Game
People can tell you how many levels, what patterns to follow to beat the levels and how to get a “perfect game”. But until now, no one’s ever told you how people really played the…
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The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
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Repairing a Bent Trombone Slide (2004)
The idea for constructing this series of pages on the technique and approach for slide action repair evolved steadily over the past several years. Many of our out of state clients that have never been to our shop have expressed great interest in just how we go about repairing their slides. Or what Daniel Oberloh…
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“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
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The Mortgaging of Sierra Online
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
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Turbinia – An Uninvited Guest (2014)
Turbinia - An Uninvited Guest
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Early Chinese World Maps (2010)
I recently came across this fascinating world map while researching the history of the Jesuit missions in seventeenth century China . Appar...
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CDs Curated by Steve Jobs and the iPod Team (2016)
The Apple event tomorrow morning (US Pacific time), takes place at Town Hall, Building 4, Apple, Inc. in Cupertino. It has been almost 15 years since I visited there the last time. 'Hint: It&...
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A look at IBM S/360 core memory: In the 1960s, 128 kilobytes weighed 610 pounds
I recently received a vintage core memory array, part of an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. These arrays were used in a 128-kilobyte core...
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