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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
At the turn of the 16th century, Johannes Kepler set out to disprove Copernicus, who believed planets orbited in perfect, concentric circles from the sun. Kepler first formulated his hypothesis: planets had elliptical orbits with two foci, and then set out to prove it mathematically. 4 years and 900 pages of…
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
Disaster Relief. We saw the best of Internet users when they pulled together to help each other through several natural disasters in 1994. The year brought floods, earthquakes, and other major tragedies. Almost immediately following each of these events, Net users gathered around their terminals and formed newsgroups…
A blog about software craft and quality
These are posters warning of potential hazards on the railway. They were used for public relation relations at various stations to alert passengers and the gene
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld-ROM…
In summer 2013 I traveled to the most isolated country in the world. I've experienced expected and unexpected things. This is my illustrated travel journal.
Marine archaeologists from Vrak - Museum of Wreck have found the wreck of the naval vessel Äpplet, Vasa's sister ship. The ship was first launched in 1629 and was built by the same master shipbuilder who completed the Vasa. The discovery was made within the research programme
What did Oppenheimer mean when he famously said, "Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds"? A foray into the Bhagavad-Gita.
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
In 2013, I had the idea of making a newsgroup search engine. All I had to do was download all newsgroup postings and index them. Well I wro...
In January of 1995, Electronic Arts bought the prestigious British games studio Bullfrog Productions for an undisclosed sum that was rumored to be in the neighborhood of $45 million. The lives of the 35 or so people who worked at Bullfrog were transformed overnight. Peter Molyneux, the man who had built the studio’s…
A couple of followups on a recent episode of In Our Time.
Any ‘computer’ is made up of hundreds of separate computers plugged together, any of which can be hacked. I list some of these parts.
software solutions to hardware problems, and outbreaks of the future. © 2007 Jamie Zawinski <jwz@jwz.org>
Classic game mods and resources
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorith...
When I was a little kid whenever we drove by mosques, I would be intrigued by the complex motifs they’re decorated by. I always tried to figure out the pattern; to me it was just a pattern, I never…
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
“Where some people have a self, most people have a void, because they are too busy in wasting their vital creative energy… actualizing a concept of what they should be like rather than …
A new analysis of mummified brains pushes back the timeline for the globalization of coca
In 1954, IBM said FORTRAN would virtually eliminate coding and debugging. What the numbers say about AI and software work in 2026, and my guess at a developer's Tuesday in 2031.
Here’s a gem from the archive of the NY Times. One day in September 1976, NY Times food critic Mimi Sheraton and Colonel Harland Sanders stopped into a Manhatta
The year is 1983, and several Apple employees visit Brown University, and get some idea of what Universities want in a computer for the coming future. The big buzz of the era was the so called 3M machine:
Ever wonder how many people currently have the enigmatic Q Clearance, the required security clearance for access to nuclear secrets? Well, I found out.
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
