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Emoji History: The Missing Years
During my research into vintage Japanese drawing software, I came across some devices that had built in sketch or handwritten memo functions. I bought a coup...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…
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John Michell: Country Parson Described Black Holes in 1783 (2000)
When a country parson first described black holes in 1783, the concept was so ahead of its time it was mostly ignored.
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The Seal Failure in the SRB That Doomed Challenger (2021)
Update 7-15-2024 : This article suddenly saw a brief spike of enormous readership in July of 2024! It became the all-time most-viewed-ever...
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Game Font Forensics
VileR's blog: old school PCs, games, graphics, programming, fonts, demos, and so on.
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0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE (2003)
Tuesday, January 28, 2003 0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE Recently, the origin of the magic numbers of 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE came up in an email conversation between a number of ex-NeXT folks. Specifically, someone asked what the origin of the two magic numbers were in the context of mach-o file formats and why had Java…
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Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV (2000)
An english translation of Edsger W. Dijkstra's interview on Dutch TV.
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This Is Knuth 3:16 (2002)
A Celebration of Donald E Knuth
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A brief history of Dell Unix (2008)
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
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Where did you go, Ms. Pac-Man?
We lost the female counterpart to Pac-Man in 2020, but Namco had been plotting her demise years beforehand.
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Graphics Tricks from Boomers
Technical details about a recent 4096bytes Atari-STE intro, by Arnaud Carré
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How DRAM changed the world
From an idea in 1966 to a patent in 1968, DRAM has had an outsized impact on the world with its dynamic random access memory technology enabling everything from mobile phones to automobiles. Cheers to 50+ years of innovation!
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Spur – RISC IV: The Lisp Multiprocessor Workstation
The hugely ambitious 'Symbolic Processing Using RISC' project from UC Berkeley
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Electronic project kits: hands on with a vintage 160-in-1 (2016)
In this day and age with the bewildering availability of electronics readily available, deciding on a project to embark on can be…
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Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
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Trilobites killed by volcanic ash
Some of the most perfectly preserved trilobite fossils ever found have revealed details of the extinct arthropod unknown until now.
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How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Challenging the conventional narrative on Intel's smartphone miss
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1989 Networking: NetWare 386
Thanks to the recent warez mega dump, another long lost gem has come to light: NetWare 386, also known as NetWare 3.0.
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Unlocking the Duron and Athlon using the pencil (2007)
Unlocking the Duron and Athlon Using the Pencil Introduction The best and most stable way to overclock your Athlon and Duron CPU is ...
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Microsoft at Work
I haven't written anything for a bit. I'm not apologizing, because y'all don't pay me enough to apologize, but I do feel a little bad. Part of it is just that I've been busy, with work and travel and events. Part of it is that I've embarked on a couple of writing projects only to have them just Not Work Out. It…
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The CIA-in-Chile Scandal at 50
Washington, D.C., September 9, 2024 – Fifty years ago, as the New York Times prepared to break a major exposé on CIA covert operations in Chile, the architect of those operations, Henry Kissinger, misled President Gerald Ford about clandestine U.S. efforts to undermine the elected government of Socialist Party leader…