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20 Years of Gentoo
Let’s see how Gentoo is doing these days. Below is a plot of Gentoo’s rankings on DistroWatch :
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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How did people deal with punch cards?
In the fall of 1976 I started as a Freshman at SUNY Stony Brook intending to major in Math and Computer Science. I took Honors Calculus I a...
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A History of the Amen Break: From the Winstons to Futurama and Om Unit
How did a six second drum sample go on to inspire entire sub-genres of music? Let's examine the history of the Amen Break.
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Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer
One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK, 1 which used a rotating globe to indicate...
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More fun with Apple's internal tools: creating a PDS card
In my last post , I figured out how to use Apple’s leaked Flasher utility from the 1990s to reflash a ROM SIMM inside of my Performa 630. It’s basically the Mac equivalent of a BIOS update, but only for Apple’s developers. The research involved in that post was quite a journey of reverse engineering from both a…
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AOL pretends to be the internet
In 1994, Ted Leonsis was the head of the new media marketing firm he created, Redgate Communications, spun out six […]
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The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
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Sun: The Network Is the Computer
The story of Sun Microsystems and the Java programming language
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The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978. This processor ended up being hugely influential, setting the path for the x86 architec...
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My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)
Making glulam of the tree of knowledge.
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AMD Killed the Itanium (2005)
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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The Bronze Age has never looked stronger
It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed…
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Archive.today: on the trail of mysterious guerrilla archivists of the Internet
Do you like reading articles in publications like Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal or the Economist, but can’t afford to pay what can be hundreds of dollars a year in subscriptions? If so, …
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Unearthing a long-ignored African writing system
When BU’s Fallou Ngom found a note written by his late father, in a language that looked like Arabic but sounded like Wolof, it opened the door to a lifetime of discovery in African language and history.
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Railway Safety Posters (2022)
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
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The Chemistry of ‘Yes Minister’ (2017)
More than raw factual errors, I’m interested in how science and scientists are depicted and how it influences peoples’ opinions of science as a process. You can’t see lasers and X…
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The KDE Free Qt Foundation: 25 Years of Celebration
We are celebrating 25 years of the KDE Free Qt Foundation.
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Usability of Old Computers
I set up a Retro PC recently. One of the reasons I did this is because I was inspired by this thread:
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Douglas Adams on Hypercard and new educational models
Douglas Adams on Hypercard + New Educational Models
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Knuth Airgaps and Knuth Buffers
Knuth knows how to maintain information hygeine.
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Hedy Lamarr (2018)
Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-American actress and inventor who pioneered the technology that would one day form the basis for today’s WiFi, GPS, and Bluetooth communication systems
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The Story behind ASINs – Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (2021)
This post explains how Amazon replaced ISBNs with ASINs (Amazon Standard Identification Numbers) for its Catalog Database Key
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How to Roman Republic 101, Part IIIb: Imperium
This is the second section of the third part of our planned five part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) on the structure of the Roman Republic during the third and second centuries, t…
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Reverse-engineering the electronics in the Globus analog navigational computer
In the Soyuz space missions, cosmonauts tracked their position above the Earth with a remarkable electromechanical device with a rotating ...
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C.R. Rao: A Life in Statistics (2020)
Presently into the 100th year of his life of vast experience, living in his Buffalo residence, here is a video message communicated by his daughter when he turned 99, at the beginning of a year-long celebration, with conferences in his honour at various places.
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8086 Processor's microcode pipeline from die analysis
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978, and its influence still remains through the popular x86 architecture. The 8086 was a fai...
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Archiving in the time of streaming
Few things are harder to start than a narrative of the thing you “do” and what all the ramifications of it are. For people who don’t make it the center of their lives, your thing …
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The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back (2022)
A Special Edition of The Ruffian