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History & Retro Computing

The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 337 posts.

2021
184

XTerm: It's Better Than You Thought

A couple months back I switched my terminal from xfce4-terminal to the venerable xterm. For some reason I always put xterm in the same bucket as xclock, xmessage, or any other prehistoric command starting with X that comes pre-installed on any graphical Linux distribution.

186

Pentium on a 386 Motherboard

I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…

194

Amazon S3’s 15th Birthday: 5,475 Days and 100T Objects

I wrote the blog post that announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) fifteen years ago today. In that post, I made it clear that the service was accessed via APIs and that it was targeted at developers, outlined a few key features, and shared pricing information. Developers found that post, started to write…

204

The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor

The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.

205

Full Throttle

The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.