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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 326 posts.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
This is not a replica of Terry Pratchett’s study. To do that, I would have needed pictures from every angle and exact measurements, so this is just a small part of a study, where Terry Pratchett might have felt at home, in scale 1:12. If you read “The Borrowers" as…
Dotted around London, there are a number of private hotels that aren’t the sort of hotel you might expect – they’re needed to make mobile phones work on the London Underground.
In 1998 Looking Glass Studios released the stealth game Thief: The Dark Project . This was just as 3D hardware acceleration was taking off, so due to the development cycle it didn't use hardware acceleration; it was a purely software-rendered game.
Building instructions. The silent helper that without a single word guides you, step by step, to transform your pile of bricks to fantastic creations. The tool that shows you building techniques and gives you a solid foundation for further exploring the wonders of the LEGO ® brick. Let’s take a look at some of the…
When developing software to run in a Unix environment, you will often be able to use the same system features and benefit from good developer tools, regardless of the particular platform you're working on, as most processors will provide a rich instruction set and virtual memory, among other things.
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
Changing from part numbers had benefits for Intel, but it took time
Not doing the reading.
Many people know, or have heard of, the Motorola 68000 architecture. These processors have been used in many machines: in the first generations of Apple Macintosh computers, in the ever-rivals Amiga and Atari ST home computers, in many workstations built by Sun , HP and NeXT (to name only a few), but also in many…
Several Egyptian gods are depicted with animal heads. Horus has a falcon head, Anubis has a jackal head, Thoth has an ibis head (except when he’s a baboon), and Set has…uhh, what is that, exactly? …
For a while there in the early 1990s, there seemed to be good reason to believe that Lemmings was on its way to becoming one of gaming’s perennial franchises. Developed by DMA Design of Dundee, Scotland, the original Lemmings game took the world by storm upon its release in 1991. From its first home on the Commodore…
An unused railway electrical control room in Surrey.
The HP C2089A “PostScript Cartridge Plus”, a 1991 add-on for the LaserJet II/III, adds PostScript Level 2 support through Adobe’s own reference interpreter (version 2010.118) on a 2 MB ROM. Thirty-five years on, that ROM is still a current PostScript implementation: it renders the language correc…
Every spring, as sure as the seasons, and for generations unknown, screwworms began their annual march northward from their overwintering sanctuaries in Mexico and South Texas.
A couple of years ago, I started serving my blog posts as plain text. Add .txt to the end of any URl and get a deliciously lo-fi, UTF-8, mono[chrome|space] alternative. Here's this post in plain text - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2025/12/a-small-collection-of-text-only-websites.txt Obviously a webpage without links is…
Wait, that's not him.
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
In the 1930s–60s, Milwaukee Electric Railway & Light Company offered trolley and bus riders a weekly burst of color and hand lettering. About 300 of these tickets are now in our collection.
Jean-Pierre Serre is a French mathematician who has made important contributions to algebraic topology, algebraic geometry, and algebraic number theory. He was a member of Bourbaki.
How a conversation on a plane in 1953 set in motion the stack that eventually processes tens of thousands of flight bookings per second, and why that stack is still here.
Jules Verne’s lost novel got the machines of 1960 right. He never imagined that Paris would keep its poets
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
Driving on Route-25a through East Shoreham, you’d never guess there was anything unusual about the gated road heading off toward the coast. But go down a ways… …and suddenly, it’ll appear through the trees… Long Island’s only nuclear power plant, closed and shuttered since it was decommissioned in 1994. Today, it sits…
EDIT: removed a couple of false positives based on comments from people. 2/04/2026: added a GitHub repository with data for this post
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
reenigne's decoding of the 8088 microcode in 2020 opened the doors for extremely accurate emulation of the 8088 CPU. Although I had added...
