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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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The Evolution of a Haskell Programmer (2001)
Some time later, I came across Iavor�s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called � The Evolution of a Programmer � in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment�s thought turned up the factorial…
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The Invention of the Baby Carrot
Baby carrots are just regular carrots cut up and polished down. They're also the biggest thing to happen to carrots since orange. How did it happen?
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50 years of proof assistants
Crackpots ranging from billionaire Peter Thiel to random YouTube influencers claim that science has been stagnating for the past 50 years. They admit that computing is an exception: they don’t pretend that my personal 32GB laptop is not an advance over the 16MB mainframe that served the whole Caltech community when I…
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Converting a Cisco 7609 into a beer tap (2021)
Last year I thought that we had reached some sort of peak in terms of how far one can go in building useless things by converting a 42U rack into a
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Nicole gets a real computer – the Microsoft Z80 SoftCard (2020)
So there I was, very happy with my Apple ][plus. But then I saw someone on the internet post, and it seems that my Apple is an overpriced box with a toy micr...
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Scouting An Abandoned Cold War Missile Base Hidden In The Adirondacks
Quick note: Though you may have read about this property before, most articles have simply reprinted the same stock real estate photos over and over. As always, all pictures are my own work, and I don’t think you’ll find a tour like this anywhere else.
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Urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build
The destructive nature of urban renewal left the U.S. too scared to build anything at scale ever again.
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Why is C the symbol for the speed of light? (2004)
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
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The Icelandic Voting System (2024)
It’s election season here in Iceland! The election is on Saturday, 30th of November, so next Saturday from when this is written. Every time elections are upcoming, somebody inevitably asks me how the voting system here works, probably expecting a simple answer. So, here’s a stab at it. Iceland uses a biproportional…
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The Deep History of Your Apps: Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and Early OO Programming
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
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DNS LOC Record (2014)
One little used type of DNS record is the LOC (or location). It allows you to specify a physical location. CloudFlare handles millions of DNS records; of those just 743 are LOCs. Nevertheless, it's possible to set up a LOC record in the CloudFlare DNS editor.
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You Too Could Have Made Curl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCJmAyUr1j4 This is the video recording of my talk with this title, done at February 4, 2024 10:00 in the K1.105 room at FOSDEM 2024. The room can hold some 800 people but there were a few hundred seats still unoccupied. Several people I met up with later have insisted that 10 am on a ……
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The Battle Line at Louvain
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
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Mario Paint Masterpiece
Mario Paint the 1992 masterpiece game, music-maker, and animation studio
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Debian 10.6
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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The Many Faces of an Undying Programming Language
This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the…
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Typecasting: The Use and Misuse of Period Typography in Movies (2001)
Chocolat (2000, Mirimax) wasn’t a bad movie.
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The short life of New York City’s first skyscraper
In 1889, a slender building was unveiled on a commercial stretch of Lower Broadway, snugly situated between two older structures. Rising 11 stories, it wasn’t the tallest tower in the city. N…
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Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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We've freed Cookie's Bustle from copyright hell
We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.
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The Applesoft Compiler (TASC): We have the source code, in a sense
The desperation of programming under tight memory constraints.
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Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...