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The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
One of the first games I ever played on my family’s Apple IIe was the Jordan Mechner master work, Karateka . Fight the bad guys, save the princess – it’s a simple but classic formula. My brother and I would take turns making our way through Akuma’s fortress. Even then, we wanted a two player version.
I love peeking behind the scenes. I like knowing how things were made. I think most people do really, it's something built-in to humans.
“That Newfangled, Abominable, Heathenish Liquor called COFFEE.” Imagine a space where you can bet on bear fights, warm your legs by th...
This post is also available in audio form, thanks to the efforts of our volunteer narrator. This week we are starting the first of a four (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) part look at pre-modern textile prod…
Tetris is a classic time-waster, both in and outside of the office. What good is any computing device if it can’t play this game? Tokyo System House certainly thought so, and ported it to the NEC mini5 line of CP/M-based word processors. Let’s preserve it for future generations and then see what it’s like!
Well, where to start! The last few weeks have consisted primarily of anticipation, excitement, and towards the end, utter exhaustion. But finally, FINALLY, the IBM is home!
It's really only in the past year or so that I had grown aware of him at all; one hears a lot of names over the course of following the industry and the Internet scene, and I'd naturally heard of him. But it was only recently that I had come to realize that I kept hearing about him in matters that were of particular…
We've all been there, right? You debug something, you try telnet to see if a port is open, and now you're stuck in a telnet session.
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth?
Data-driven approach to history
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!
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…
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…
The quartz oscillator is an important electronic circuit, providing highly-accurate timing signals at a low cost. A quartz crystal has the...
Oh look what you just made there.
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
Fragments of a rare Merlin manuscript from the 1200s discovered and digitised in a ground-breaking three-year project at Cambridge University Library.
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
(A footnote on Inga Clendinnen’s extraordinary “ Aztecs: An Interpretation .” If there’s a better book on the Aztecs than this, I want to r...
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…
Steve Barcia started thinking about his second grand-strategy game well before he had finished creating his first one. While he was waiting for his latest iteration of Master of Orion to compile each day in the cramped Austin, Texas, offices of his company SimTex, he sketched in the mental details of a follow-up that…
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
