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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
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The Shareware Scene, Part 4: Doom
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D ‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid…
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The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and...
185
Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done
Groucho Marx? Fred Waring? Ed Gardner? Goodman Ace? Jane Ace? Fred Allen? Ernie Kovacs? Deane Binder? Anonymous?
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Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
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Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
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Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
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Peter Montgomery Has Died
Peter was born in San Francisco, California, on September 25, 1947. He went to UC Berkeley in 1967 and received a BA in Mathematics in 1969 and an MA in 1971. Peter’s undergraduate advisor was Derrick H. Lehmer, an excellent match given Peter’s research interests since high school: integer factorization.
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How We Got the Favicon (2017)
The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.
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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
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Restoring a 37 Year-Old IBM F Mechanical Keyboard
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...
197
How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
From 2019 on, the Latvian National Archive offers access to various KGB documents.The Archive digitized operation cases and also special KGB training manuals.
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Debian 10.6
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the…
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Dead Sea Scroll fragments thought to be blank reveal text
New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text. The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated…
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Book Review: Hoover
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
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Lemmings 2: The Tribes
When the lads at DMA Design started making the original Lemmings , they envisioned that it would allow you to bestow about twenty different “skills” upon your charges. But as they continued working on the game, they threw more and more of the skills out, both to make the programming task simpler and to make the final…
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The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
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NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 1: Installation
It’s been a long time since my last pizzabox post - over a year! There’s been a lot going on in my life but I’m excited that lately I’ve had a lot more free time , which means more time to explore the world of workstations and share with you!
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LiveCode is a modern day HyperCard (2019)
AndreGarzia.com website
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Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
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The text adventure game of exiting a Telnet session
We've all been there, right? You debug something, you try telnet to see if a port is open, and now you're stuck in a telnet session.
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Lost Advanced Civilizations
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth?
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Why Military History?
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…