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Mac history echoes in current Mac operating systems
Ars Technica mentioned that in macOS Tahoe the venerable old hard disk icons will be replaced with new, more generic, relatively less inte...
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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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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.
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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...
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What Happened to Abit Motherboards
Capacitor plague and bad accounting practices were a lethal one-two punch
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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…
246
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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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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Reverse Engineering All the Raspberry Pis
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…
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Hate Radio (2011)
Anti-Tutsi articles and graphic cartoons began appearing in the Kangura newspaper from around 1990. In June 1993 a new radio station called Radio-Television Libre des Mille Collines (RTLMC) began broadcasting in Rwanda…
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Primer on FedEx's Distribution Network (2024)
With a map!
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Standard Ebooks Public Domain Day 2025 in Literature
Read about the new ebooks Standard Ebooks is releasing for Public Domain Day 2025!
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BBC Micro, ancestor to ARM
Meet my BBC Master, plus 5 1/4" floppy disk drive, and three-button mouse
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Keyboards from my collection (2023)
The most interesting keyboards I ever acquired
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Sony FX-300 Jackal: A technological marvel of the late 70s (2021)
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
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The Rise of Computer Games, Part I: Adventure
Author’s note: I originally intended for this post to cover adventure games, computer role-playing games, wargames and other simulations, a brief look at the home video game market, and final…
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Did the Windows 95 setup team forget that MS-DOS can do graphics?
Oh look what you just made there.
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Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from c. 1300
Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from the 1200s discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library.
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Lessons from That 1834 Landscape Gardening Guidebook
Hermann Ludwig Heinrich Count of Pückler-Muskau was born in 1785 to the Earl Pückler and was later granted sovereignty over his land by King Friedrich III. His fame is unbroken today, but not because of his political power, but because his house chef named a dessert after him. In German and Dutch, the now popular…
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The Humble Programmer (1972)
As a result of a long sequence of coincidences I entered the programming profession officially on the first spring morning of 1952 and as far as I have been able to trace, I was the first Dutchman to do so in my country. In retrospect the most amazing thing was the slowness with which, at least in my part of the…
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East German Stasi Tactics – Zersetzung (2021)
A look at the experiences of activists in East Germany (GDR) dealing with Stasi informants and infiltration before the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.
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The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2025 was awarded "for having explained innovation-driven economic growth" with one half to Joel Mokyr "for having identified the prerequisites for sustained growth through technological progress" and the other half jointly to Philippe Aghion…
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A brief, incomplete, and mostly wrong history of robotics
(An homage to one of my favorite pieces on the internet: A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages)
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Why I'm Learning Sumerian
After burning out on a massive project, I started learning Sumerian, a language no one’s spoken in 4,000 years. What began as a useless obsession turned into a lesson on meaning, burnout, and the quiet joy of doing hard things that don’t need to matter.
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What were the earliest laws like?
Hammurabi’s code doesn’t tell the whole story
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The MP3.com Rescue Barge Barge
So back in November, I grabbed 1.78TB of media from the Internet Archive’s mp3.com Rescue Barge, and their Wayback Machine both, in pursuit of creating the most thoroughly complete archive I can muster of MP3.com’s music.
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Airbrush art of the 80s (2015)
The 80’s was a decade of many things — excess, greed, and big hair, to name a few — but it was also the heyday for airbrush art. As a teenager in the late 80’s, I desperately wanted an airbrush so I could paint my favorite band logos on the back of my jean jacket, and maybe make some money on the side painting…