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Nvidia emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128/NV3 architecture history and overview
An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
2522
The History of Microsoft Encarta
Searchable Human Knowledge
2523
Evolution of the English Alphabet
Buy the poster | Watch a video explanation
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Early Days of AI
Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past "AI", it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
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Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...
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Leonardo Da Vinci’s Self-Powered Cart (2021)
A club for Meccano enthusiasts in London, holding four meetings each year and a public Meccano Show in Falconwood.
2529
On compiling 34 year old C code
The 34 year old C code is the C code for ed and sed from Unix Version 7. I’ve been getting it to compile on a modern POSIXish system. Some changes had to be made. But not very many. The union…
2530
How to Roman Republic 101
This is the first of a planned five-part series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IIIc, IV, V, A1, A2) looking at the structure of the Roman Republic as another example of civic governance structures in antiquit…
2531
Inside a 20-Watt Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier from Apollo
How did the Apollo astronauts communicate on their trip to the Moon, 240,000 miles back to Earth? They used a 32-pound amplifier, built ar...
2532
A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
2533
So You Want to Be a Hero?
Rule #1 is “The Player Must have Fun.” It’s trivially easy for a game designer to “defeat” players. We have all the tools and all the power. The trick is to play on the same side as the players, to tell the story together, and to make them the stars.
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After 41 years, my first assembly program on my first computer, the Tomy Tutor
We got it in 1983, I think, so it only took me about 41 years to get around to it. This Tomy Tutor isn't a replacement system I secondarily ...
2535
Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
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Repairing a 1960s mainframe: Fixing the IBM 1401's core memory and power supply
A few weeks ago, I wanted to use one of the vintage IBM 1401 mainframe computers at the Computer History Museum, but the computer wasn't wor...
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
2540
Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
A lot has been said about the role of artillery in World War I, in both its intensity and ferocity. On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and s…
2541
Learning from Ada
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
2542
What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
2543
Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
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The Nobel Peace Prize for 2014
The Nobel Peace Prize 2014 was awarded jointly to Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai "for their struggle against the suppression of children and young people and for the right of all children to education"
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How Websites Die
I recently started compiling a list of defunct blogging platforms . It’s been interesting to see how websites die — from domain parking pages to timeouts to blank pages to outdated TLS cipher errors, there are a multitude of different ways.
2546
A one-bit processor explained: reverse-engineering the vintage MC14500B
The Motorola MC14500B 1 is a 1-bit processor introduced in 1976. While a 1-bit processor might seem almost useless, 2 it was marketed as...
2547
How the Å came to be
Major upheavals in printing technology, language, politics, and religion converged in the fourteenth century, setting the stage for a brand…
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How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
From 2019 on, the Latvian National Archive offers access to various KGB documents.The Archive digitized operation cases and also special KGB training manuals.
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