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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
IBM used some unusual techniques in its integrated circuits, and one of the most visible is packaging them in square metal cans. I've been...
The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.
Founded in 1920, the NBER is a private, non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to conducting economic research and to disseminating research findings among academics, public policy makers, and business professionals.
What did Vincent van Gogh look like? His self-portraits provide a good indication. Read on to find out all about them.
Fireside this week! Next week, with luck, I’ll have my ‘On the Reign of Alexander III of Macedon’ up as an addendum to our discussion of Hellenistic armies. But in the meantime, i…
「99歳にもなったら入れる施設なんてあるのだろうか…」こんな悩みを抱えてはいませんか？現代社会は「少子高齢化社会」と呼ばれ、人口に占める高齢者の数が増えてきています。また、医療の発達により寿命はどんどん長くなっており、介護に関する悩みを抱える人も多いのではないでしょうか。
There’s been a secret feature on the DOS-related emulated programs on the Internet Archive. It’s been there for over a half a year now. I’ll explain what it is and why I didn̵…
A key concept for a processor is the management of "state", information that persists over time. Much of a computer is built from logic gate...
"IF FOUND--Please return to Paramount Pictures"
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
A fascinating interlude from James Kaplan's new book '3 Shades of Blue'
C ard punches of various types, models and makes featured an option to print the characters encoded by the holes punched in any of the columns in human readable form onto the top of the card. While it is well known that these characters were printed by a 5 × 7 dot matrix, comprehensive information on what these…
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.
One American writer said to me, “Your books will never sell in America because you can’t hear the elves sing. Americans go in for fantasy books where you can hear the elves sing.”
Impressive, but too late to the party
On cartography as historical argument
dsp's personal site
Or, how a precocious youth briefly conquered the UK
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...
A tour on how DOS was able to use most of the 1 MB address space of the 8086
If you've followed any tech news aggregator in the past week (the week of the 24th of May, 2015), you've probably seen the story about how SourceForge is taking over admin accounts for existing projects and injecting adware in installers for packages like GIMP. For anyone not following the story, SourceForge has a…
Subject: mother of all grease fires Date: Fri, 23 Sep 94 17:34:09 PDT From: Brian Reid [email address lost in the bog standard forwarding frenzy]
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
The adventure makers at LucasArts had a banner 1993. One of the two games they released that year, Day of the Tentacle , was the veritable Platonic ideal of a cartoon-comedy graphic adventure; the other, Sam and Max Hit the Road , was merely very, very good.
