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A UC Santa Cruz professor unearthed the oldest alphabet yet
The emerging importance of the find underscores a key truth about archaeology: artifacts often hold secrets that only later generations can unlock.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Confirmed the MOS 7600/7601 Pong chip is a true microcontroller
In a previous article I discussed the MOS 7600 and 7601 "Pong in a chip" ICs, manufactured by MOS Technology (of the famous 6502) and act...
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The Story of Mel, A Real Programmer, Annotated (1996)
A recent article devoted to the macho side of programming made the bald and unvarnished statement:
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Neo Geo Architecture: A practical analysis
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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Parsing the C64 Bubble Bobble Wind Currents
This would be my website, I guess.
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“Space age electronics”: Inside a GE thin-film paperweight from the 1960s
In the early 1960s, General Electric developed a technology called thin-film electronics. 1 These circuits were built from thin films of ...
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Inside the 76477 Space Invaders sound effect chip
The 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip (1978) provided sound effects for Space Invaders 1 and many other video games . It was also a pop...
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The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
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Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
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Boeing Flies on 99% Ada
A discussion of how Boeing used Ada in its new 777 jet to run a complete fly-by-wire system that technicians backup and monitor with on-board floppy disks. The Ada Information Clearinghouse is the Ada Resource Association's official Web site on the Ada programming language and on software engineering.
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Battersea Power Station in London unveils the newly restored Control Room A
⦁ Battersea Power Station has revealed the fully restored Control Room A, the first of the Grade II* listed building’s two original Control Rooms which
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Space Truckin' – The Nostromo (2012)
“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…
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Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
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The Heart of Unix (2018)
Despite all of its warts, I like working in Linux. I've used it for 15 years and I've never been as productive in another environment. Most people claim that it's the configurability of Linux that keep the users coming. That may have attracted me at first, but what attracts me now is its programmability.
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NeXT: Steve Jobs’ Dot.com IPO That Never Happened
Had Steve Jobs’ first company not bought his second, history likely would have been very different. Apple might not exist today. No iPhone. But what could have happened to NeXT?
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The Invention of Zero
“If you look at zero you see nothing; but look through it and you will see the world.”
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Amazon S3’s 15th Birthday: 5,475 Days and 100T Objects
I wrote the blog post that announced Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) fifteen years ago today. In that post, I made it clear that the service was accessed via APIs and that it was targeted at developers, outlined a few key features, and shared pricing information. Developers found that post, started to write…
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Ten Years of Instapaper
On January 28, 2008, Marco Arment announced a new side project called Instapaper. Ten years and billions of articles later, we’re thrilled to be helping our readers learn, research and experience the Internet removed from the typical distractions.
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Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
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How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
When an experiment with existing open source technology just cherry-picks results to make it look good
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“Origins of the Apple human interface” lecture – an annotated transcription
The lecture was delivered by Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa in 1997 at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.
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The Great Renaming 1985 – 1988 (2000)
The Great Renaming FAQ
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Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner
This post will explore the famous winner of the first IOCCC contest, dive into the story behind the code, and even display the original source programs!