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Erich von Däniken has died
It is with great sadness and shock that we must announce that Erich von Däniken passed away on January 10, 2026.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
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Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
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How the Chorleywood Bread Process transformed British bread
How a Hertfordshire research lab quietly transformed an iconic British staple food, and the complexion of the countryside - without anyone actually noticing
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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Rereading: The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (2017)
by James Wallace Harris, Friday, January 6, 2017 I first read The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder just after it came out in 1981, before it won the Pulitzer and National Book awards in 1982. …
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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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Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?
A statistical test of whether the Sumerian King List's antediluvian reigns line up with paleoclimate events better than chance.
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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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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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The True Story of the Amazon Door-Desk
Several years ago, I said I would no longer publicly comment about my time in 1996–1997 as Amazon.com's catalog manager. Why? Because my knowledge and memory were so out of date, and I did not keep a journal during that period. It would be silly for me
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A Simple Explanation: VLC.js
The previous entry got the attention it needed, and the maintainers of the VLC project connected with both Emularity developers and Emscripten developers and the process has begun. The best example…
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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
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Boards of Casio
While working away on the CZP-1 , which was at least initially an effort to create a Casio CZ-101 on a web page I happened to see this YouTube video by oliveoil22:
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Documenting equipment losses during the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine
By Jakub Janovsky , Naalsio , Aloha , Dan , Kemal , and Alexander Black This list only in...
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C Programming on System 6 – Implementing Multi-User Chat
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Teaching Machiavelli through his letters
Hello! It’s been a while since I posted since, as usual, many projects press, so it’s rare for me to have the time to write the kinds of polished essays I like sharing here. But I’ve been hoping to share more things, since a lot of the history work I’ve been doing lately has helped me with reflecting on current…
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Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers
Brinch Hansen was one of the pioneers of concurrent programming and operating systems (kernels). In the 1960s, Brinch Hansen worked at the Danish computer company Regnecentralen, first in the compiler group headed by Peter Naur and Jørn Jensen, and, later, as the chief architect of the RC 4000 minicomputer and its…
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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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NEC’s Forgotten FPUs
NEC had a cross license agreement with Intel dating back to April of 1976 that allowed each company to make/sell products based on each others patents. This was particularly important in the 1970’s as having a viable ‘second source’ for your designs was considered critical for it to be viable in the market. This was…
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Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2026 was awarded jointly to Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel "for their discoveries concerning light-gated ion channels and optogenetics"
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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.