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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
Researchers at the Rijksmuseum have demonstrated that the painting Vision of Zacharias in the Temple (1633) was made by Rembrandt. They examined the work with the same advanced techniques used in Operation Night Watch , and closely compared it with other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period. Materials analysis…
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
I am a big fan of Street Fighter 2. Certainly not the greatest but likely among the nerdiest since I wrote an entire book about its platform [1] . It won't be a surprise to learn that, back in December 1992, I was eagerly waiting for the Super Nintendo port so I could stop sinking my rare 10 Francs coins into the…
On August 31, 1966, a 44-year-old electrical engineer named Ralph Baer had an epiphany whilst waiting for a colleague outside a New York City bus terminal. For reasons he would never be able to explain, his thoughts turned to the potential of an interactive version of television. The next day, he sat down in his…
Software abstraction ladder becomes too tall and starts to fall
Why are Haiti and the DR so different?
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
It is striking that this part of Japan houses two sets of structures, both of nearly equal age, and both made of largely ephemeral materials that have lasted over 14 centuries through totally different mechanisms and religions.
Yes, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard is as good as I remembered.
And it was so avoidable! The bug was from a piece of dead code, left over from the previous Ariane 4 mission a decade before.
Ever wondered what useful things you could do with a 32 year old laptop? Well, this is one option: In this project I added a Raspberry PI Zero to the insides of the laptop. Both are connected via a…
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
Konstantinos Giapis delves into the science of the iconic accident for a PBS special.
Yesterday, the web celebrated its 25th birthday and to join in, I have a little story. A couple of years ago I found a NeXTcube. I'm not going to say where it is to avoid vandalism (the computer is publicly accessible under some circumstances without much oversight), but this is the story. Sir Tim Berners-Lee…
We lost the female counterpart to Pac-Man in 2020, but Namco had been plotting her demise years beforehand.
IBM's vacuum tube computers of the 1950s were built from pluggable modules, each holding eight tubes and the associated components. I recent...
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You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive. – Richard Feynman, to his wife, Arlene Richard Feynman is famous for his ceaseless questioning of life and the universe, to a degree unexpected even for being a Nobel Prize quantum physicist. His dogged investigation of the Challenger explosion is the most…
It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.
I recently did a PC power supply teardown so I figured it would be interesting to go deeper and see what happens inside the power supply'...
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
Technical details about a recent 4096bytes Atari-STE intro, by Arnaud Carré
