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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
What started as a conversation on the beach between two scientists led to the “Nobel Prize in computing“ decades later. More on Charles Bennet, co-recipient of the 2025 Turing Award.
At the end of last year, there were a couple of articles about Japan’s failure to be a giant in the new digital age (Newsweek on Why Apple Isn’t Japanese , and there were some interesting comments in a blog response Japan is no longer a leader in Electronics ). Unfortunately, the Newsweek article completely ignores…
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
TAI times are identified by year, month, day, hour, minute, and second. There are exactly 86400 TAI seconds in every TAI day. TAI days are labelled by the Gregorian calendar.
A look at three relics of a not-quite-bygone era. In picture-listicle form.
I was there, Gandalf. I was there 3000 years ago when... Not really; I wish I were there, but I joined as soon as I could.
Welcome! This is going to be the first of a new sort of post we’ll do from time to time where I answer a number of shorter questions posed by my patrons over at Patreon who are at the Patres …
What Could Have Entered the Public Domain on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978 . . . Works from 1955 The End of Eternity, The Body Snatchers, Why Johnny Can’t Read: And What You Can Do About It, Rebel Without a Cause, Lady and the Tramp, To Catch A Thief, Picasso’s Don Quixote, […]
Who needs a jack-o-lantern when you've got a bright orange gas plasma display? This is a 1990 Solbourne Computer S3000 all-in-one workst...
Of all the Crossrail stations, the most controversial has to be Bond Street - as it's so behind schedule that it might not open when the Elizabeth line's own delayed opening takes place.
It’s 32 years old, and it remains the single greatest book ever written about a programming language. Its crown is secure; even if you’d not already read the title of this article, you…
While Google may have lost the recent bidding for Nortel's patent portfolio, they did quietly acquire over a 1,000 patents from IBM this past month.
It should be evident to anyone viewing this website that I have a bit of a vintage computer obsession. And regular readers who’ve been paying attention over the past year and a half or so likely know that my other … Continue reading →
New research has revealed that four Dead Sea Scroll manuscript fragments housed at The University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library, which were previously thought to be blank, do in fact contain text. The discovery means that The University of Manchester is the only institution in the UK to possess authenticated…
The plainly wrong behavior of a ubiquitous Python library echoes a British astronomical report from 1884.
How four partners took an idea from a whiteboard to the browser
“When we invented the personal computer, we created a new kind of bicycle…a new man-machine partnership…a new generation of…
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
Earlier this month I covered Jonathan Clark's effort to reverse-engineer the Pi Zero 2 W, and just yesterday, I discovered TubeTime reverse-engineered the Compute Module 5. i reverse-engineered the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5! check it out at github.com/schlae/cm5-r... [image or embed] — Tube Time…
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
Douglas Self, clock, Pneumatic
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
A rough start to what would later become one of my favorite tech ads from the 80s.
You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Bu…
