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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
The legacy of Solferino is in more danger than ever
The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering and Manufacturing. A "Brief" History of CAD by David E. Weisberg
What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frame...
When entertaining the idea of communities issuing their own money (called complementary currencies ), people often wonder if that idea has been successfully done before. In doing our research into the concept, we encountered a number of stories where communities issued their own currency and produced a prosperity…
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
I followed my curiosity and ended up at the library reading hundreds of letters of runaway teenagers who came to hippie San Francisco
Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, maki…
The first "pro" ST
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
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…
The emerging importance of the find underscores a key truth about archaeology: artifacts often hold secrets that only later generations can unlock.
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
This would be my website, I guess.
“I was really influenced by three films,” Ridley Scott told Fantastic Films in 1979, on the subject of the Nostromo and its claustrophobic corridors. “Not so much in terms of Star…
A story with legal drama, a mystery, snow leopards, and, uh, naughty bits.
The death rate per mile driven has declined 22-fold since 1950.
Electricity has started flowing through a deep-level tube train sized tunnel running through South London.
AN EXTREMELY RARE “MEGALOGRAPHY” OF THE 1ST CENTURY BC, LIKE THE FAMOUS VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES Over 100 years since the discovery of the Villa of the Mysteries, a large … keep it going
The scaffolding surrounding the Charing Cross railway bridge has received an addition – two bales of hay/straw – because an ancient law requires it.
Interactive visualization of the history of the latin alphabet, showing the temporal and formal relationships of the different scripts and typefaces to each other
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home…
I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving…
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
