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How did MS-DOS decide on two seconds to keep the floppy disk cache valid?
A stopwatch and a race against time.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 233 posts.
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How to Build a Pyramid
Exactly how did the Egyptians build the Pyramid of Khufu and its two great successors on the Giza Plateau? That question has been debated at least since the time of Herodotus. Many a person has looked upon what the Egyptians are alleged to have wrought, compared it with the early date which historians assign to it…
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“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)
"THAT DEEP ROMANTIC CHASM": LIBERTARIANISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE COMPUTER CULTURE
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Building a vacuum tube computer
Having 32 (31) registers, this means that a refresh will be issued each 256us. To be on the safe side, the capacitor should keep its charge much longer than that. Testing with both EAA91 (ideal diode) and some semiconductors: Diode charge hold time Comment EAA91 >500us ideal diode 1N4148 >500us for reference, leakage…
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The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
Serial Number of First Unix System In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC fo...
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Lessons from the Long Depression
"war, after all, is a highly effective (though destructive) demand stimulus." Sinking new warships, new warplanes, new tanks in the ocean without ever having used them would still be a great demand stimulus. So why not sink the money in infrastructure etc. ?
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“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
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The Battlefield After the Battle
Today we’re going to talk about what a pre-modern battlefield might look like after the battle is over. Obvious content warning, since this post is going to talk about (and show pictures of) …
221
Pay a visit to Cambridge’s computer museum
Down a rather shabby road in a Cambridge industrial estate can be found a haven of retro computing delights - the Centre for Computing History.
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Historical Map of the Cognitive Sciences: An Attempt
Map of the cognitive science, historical from 1930 to 2020 with prehistory and future prediction. Including Psychology, Artificial Intelligence, Mathematics, Neuroscience, Biology and more.
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Rethinking the Commodore 64 Memory Map (2018)
I've had my head down, programming away on C64 OS, and been making some great progress. I've tweeted a few things out, some of which are revealing of things I've either never talked about here or even seem to contradict what I've said here. So I'd like to take a breather and talk about some of these developments.
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King Alfred and India
[The following post has now been fully revised, expanded and published as C. R. Green, 'King Alfred and India: an Anglo-Saxon Embassy to Sou...
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Installing A/UX on the Quadra 610 (2018)
In this post, I’m going to go through the process of setting up Apple’s A/UX on a Quadra 610. It’s been a long time in the making - I think I had the hardware for nearly a year before I finally got A/UX running properly!
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Commodore 900
Click the Commodore icon to return. Intending to use pictures or text from this page? Please read this notice . Last modify 11 August 2020.
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Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
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World's oldest periodic table chart found in St. Andrews
A periodic table chart discovered at the University of St Andrews is thought to be the oldest in the world.
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Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer
Onboard the Apollo spacecraft, the revolutionary Apollo Guidance Computer helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. One of the f...
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A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 35th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
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Interview with Dennis Ritchie (2003)
dmr: I'm not a person who particularly had heroes when growing up.
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Welcome to Gentoo is Rice, the Volume goes to 11 here.
Welcome, this page is dedicated to the Linux Community's greatest ambassadors, Gentoo users. Like the annoying teenager next door with a 90hp import sporting a 6 foot tall bolt-on wing, Gentoo users are proof that society is best served by roving gangs of armed vigilantes, dishing out swift, cold justice with baseball…
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Collapse OS — Bootstrap post-collapse technology
I expect our global supply chain to collapse before we reach 2030. With this collapse, we won't be able to produce most of our electronics because their production depends on a very complex supply chain that we won't be able to achieve again for decades (ever?).