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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
elementary OS rounds out its first decade
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
Thanks to the conservation team at the Kansas Cosmosphere and Space Center, the Apollo F-1 artifacts are ready for display. A few weeks ago the first shipment of artifacts arrived at The Museum of Flight here in Seattle, and I joined museum president Doug King, adjunct curator for space history Geoff Nunn, and…
The term script kiddie probably originated around 1994, but the first public record is from 1996.
สล็อตเว็บตรง แตกง่าย ด้วยการเล่นผ่านโทรศัพท์มือถือสามารถเล่นได้ทุกที่ทุกเวลาตลอด 24 ชั่วโมง ทำให้ได้รับความนิยมอย่างแพร่หลายเหตุปัจจุบัน
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
A 2021 Journey from Oregon Trail to A.I. Dungeon
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.
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
If you look for information about the Macintosh Plus and its ROM, you’ll usually find that the ROM has a capacity of 128 KB and that it exists in three revisions . But that’s incorrect: there’s a fourth ROM, 256 KB in size, which includes fonts for kanji (Japanese characters). And I found (and preserved) this ROM. I’m…
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…
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
This article describes the inner workings of Massively Interleaved Sprite Crunch ( MISC ), a new C64 demo effect introduced in my demo Lunatico .
kottke.org is 20 years old today. Holy shit! On March 14, 1998, I launched a new episode of 0sil8 called “Notes”. 0sil8 was a previous website of mine, started
Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988 (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part numbers, I did a double take when I realized that a file with random e-mail fragments was, in…
I’m considered to be a server guy. I had access to some really awesome server machines. Still, when computers come up in discussions, we are almost exclusively talk about workstations. Even if servers are an important part of my life, that’s “just” work. I loved the SGI workstations I had access to during my…
Why did the oracle of Delphi go into a trance state? Does it have anything to do with ethylene?
As recent politics illustrates, Eton has a reputation for producing pupils who achieve high office, but who are not sufficiently competent to hold high office. One thing that is rarely mentioned, however, is all the murder.
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…
There’s lots of somethings to be said for sheer audacity in art, for a willingness to stick your neck out and give your audience something they never, ever expected from you. I think sometimes about how the first folks who listened to Revolver must have felt when the erstwhile cuddly Fab Four unleashed the…
It’s hard to remember, now , but there was a time when Facebook was the most exciting thing on the Internet.
A tour of the many historical implementations of the Unix cat utility.
