2911
File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink
Fun with LapLink 5 and parallel port file transfers under FreeDOS
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 4,252 posts.
2912
A cautionary tale from the decline of SourceForge
There are thousands of books in print today about starting a business, but only a handful about ending one and moving on . Tamburri2020 is a deep dive into one particular (and not yet complete) ending: the decline of SourceForge , which was the first (and for many years the largest) open source software forge. Over…
2913
2914
What was a Token Ring network?
Token Ring and ARCNET once competed with Ethernet as networking standards
2915
dBase: 1979-2026
Litigation, neglect killed dBase. The dBase newsgroup servers went off-line since November 2025. Court-smart dBase vendors and AI accelerated the fall.
2916
History of Emacs and vi Keys (2010)
In my study of keyboarding in the past 20 years, i've noticed that the choices of many shortcuts in many apps are adopted to the many aspects of the keyboard hardware of the time in use by the community. Emacs's keybinding is not simply based on the first letter of commands, but the QWERTY layout's key positions have…
2917
Google Chrome for Linux goes stable
Since the initial beta release of Google Chrome for Linux last December , we've been hard at work adding the polish necessary to upgrade th...
2918
The Future That Never Was
In 1990, the strategic PC operating system of Microsoft and IBM was not DOS, not Windows, but OS/2. The first 16-bit OS/2 was initially released in 1987 with a reduced feature set, but by the end of 1989, OS/2 1.2 completed two major features: The Presentation Manager GUI (first seen in OS/2 1.1) and installable file…
2919
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…
2920
The Problem with Sci-Fi Body Armor
This week we’re covering the winning topic from the latest ACOUP Senate poll, which is a look at some of the odd designs and mechanics for futuristic science fiction body armor, particularly …
2921
Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro
In 1981, the BBC set out to educate Great Britain about computers. It did a really good job.
2922
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
2923
Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
2924
2925
We'll buy back your Typewriter for Uncle Sam
In this blog post, we will explore another poster I recently bought, which highlights Smith-Corona’s campaign to buy back typewriters for the U.S. government due to wartime shortages during World War II.
2926
2927
War Elephants, Part II: Elephants Against Wolves (2019)
Today, in Part II of our three part series on War Elephants, we’re going to look at the drawbacks of war elephants. Last time (here), we discussed the factors that made war elephants so power…
2928
2929
2930
Man, Myth and Magic
Collect the set! I don’t really need a digital copy of Man, Myth and Magic—I’ve been the fortunate owner for many years of the bound set of original magazines you see above—but I imagin…
2931
2932
South Korean President Park Geun-hye's corruption scandal
President Park Geun-hye issues a public apology on October 25, 2016. ( source ) President Park Geun-hye is in deep trouble. The sto...
2933
Decoding the 90s: Cryptography in Early Software Development (2023)
In August 2020 we were commissioned to recover a cache of locked QText documents from the mid-90s. This is the process of analyzing the encrypted documents and reverse engineering a DOS-era Hebrew-English word processor written in Turbo Pascal.
2934
The Sega Master System
We traditionally divide consoles into “generations”—the earliest devices like the Magnavox Odyssey are the first generation, the Atari 2600 is second, the NES third, the SNES and Genesi…
2935
The Color of the Future: A history of blue
A history of blue 🦋
2936
2937
JAMMA Video Standard
Everyone had their weird pandemic hobby, right? Well, mine is that I bought an arcade video game. Not the whole cabinet - just a board, to hook up ...
2938
Google's "Chrome Frame" plugin for IE no longer requires admin rights
We released Google Chrome Frame in September 2009 to expand the reach of modern web technologies and help developers take advantage of HTML...
2939
2940
Adam74: A terminal for a small 8-bit computer
Something that struck me reading about the history of the Apple I computer was the fairly simple “ASCII bus” that it used for input and output. As I understand it a hobbyist back in the day could get an ASCII keyboard that quite literally presented as an interface a header giving 7-bits of ASCII and an additional…