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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 337 posts.
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Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio
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Why Japan Didn’t Create the iPod (2008)
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
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Feelings at the Fall of the Republic, Ancient and Medieval Living Standards
Welcome! This is going to be the first of a new sort of post we’ll do from time to time where I answer a number of shorter questions posed by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the Patres …
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Yamaha DX7 reverse-engineering, part III: Inside the log-sine ROM
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer for 1980s pop music. It used two custom digital chips to generate so...
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The Death of the Festival
<p>(Part 1 of a multi-part series)</p> <p><em>We live a double life, civilized in scientific and technical matters,</em> <em>wild and primitive in the things of the soul. That we are no longer conscious of being primitive, makes our tamed kind of wildness all the more dangerous.</em> – Hans Von Hentig</p> <p>The…
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Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist
Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.
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The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies
This is the second part (I, II, III, IV, V) of a series asking the question ‘Who were the Romans?’ How did they understand themselves as a people and the idea of ‘Roman’ as …
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The Mother of All ‘Abandoned’ Airports (2015)
West Berlin's lifeline during the Soviet Blockade, Tempelhof Airport has since become the city’s biggest park. Berliners will fight to keep it that way.
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Live Not by Lies (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
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Commodore 64 Ads from the 1980s
Computer magazine advertisements from the 1980s were just plain fantastic.
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Things JRR Tolkien has never said, done, written or had anything to do with
A list of things any decent Tolkien fan should avoid, ignore, despise and never ever share except for enlightening people they are getting it wrong. Thanks!
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DrScheme in Space
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
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A Retrospective Look at Mac OS X Snow Leopard
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
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Installing Linux into a 286 laptop from the year 1989
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
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Caltech professor helps solve Hindenburg disaster
Konstantinos Giapis delves into the science of the iconic accident for a PBS special.
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Reverse-engineering a vintage power supply chip from die photos
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
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Clothing, How Did They Make It? Part I: High Fiber
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This week we are starting the first of a four (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) part look at pre-modern textile prod…
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Teardown of a quartz crystal oscillator and the tiny IC inside
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
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C Programming on System 6 – Implementing Multi-User Chat
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Teaching Machiavelli through his letters
Hello! It’s been a while since I posted since, as usual, many projects press, so it’s rare for me to have the time to write the kinds of polished essays I like sharing here. But I’ve been hoping to share more things, since a lot of the history work I’ve been doing lately has helped me with reflecting on current…
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NEC’s Forgotten FPUs
NEC had a cross license agreement with Intel dating back to April of 1976 that allowed each company to make/sell products based on each others patents. This was particularly important in the 1970’s as having a viable ‘second source’ for your designs was considered critical for it to be viable in the market. This was…
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The historical significance of DEC and the PDP-7, -8, -11 and VAX
Earlier today, I saw a link on the ClassicCmp.org mailing list to a project to re-implement the DEC VAX CPU on an FPGA. Its entitled First new vax in ...30 years? Someone posted it on Hackernews . One of the comments said, roughly, that they didnt see the significance and…
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History of ZFS Part 2: Exploding in Popularity
Discover how ZFS rapidly gained popularity from its inception at Sun, leading to the rise of OpenZFS. Learn about its journey in the second part of our series.
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Why we don’t understand heavier-than-air flight
If you've been reading popular science websites or magazines lately, then you may have heard the news: we don't understand how airplanes work. For example:…
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How factories were made safe
The fundamental cause was a wrong attitude towards the core question: who is responsible for safety?
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Paul Erdős (2000)
Erdős posed and solved problems in number theory and other areas and founded the field of discrete mathematics.
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Isn't she just Misunderstood? The Casio Loopy
Imagine asking Julius Caesar to review the arcade game Galaga. He lacks the knowledge of space that even children have today, and certainly can’t recognize a...
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1983: Suspended
A young writer crosses paths with the designer of Zork, sparking a surprisingly experimental game where you experience reality from six unique perspectives.
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