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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 182 posts.
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The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 awarded to Bob Dylan
The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016 was awarded to Bob Dylan "for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition"
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The void left by the parallel port
Resurrecting a dead interface
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Censored Photographs of FDR’s Japanese Concentration Camps
The military seized her photographs, quietly depositing them in the National Archives, where they remained mostly unseen and unpublished until 2006.
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A Brief History of Who Ruined Burning Man
In 1986, at the very first Burn, a crowd of complete strangers gathered around the Man once it was lit it on fire. Nobody had invited them. They didn’t know anything about the 10 Principles, or understand what The Man was...
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The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It’s practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my
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10th Anniversary of JQuery
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of jQuery. I announced it back at BarCamp NYC 2006 when I was still in college. It’s incredible to think of how far it’s come and just how many people have contributed to its success. To them I am forever grateful, thank you.
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Why do old statues have such small penises?
Reader question: “Why do all old statues have such small penises?” The reader who sent me this felt that it was a question that was maybe too silly for my blog, but – firstly – there ar…
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Dick Smith Is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time
Want to know how to turn $10m in to $520m in less than two years? Just ask Anchorage Capital. The private equity group has pulled off one of the great heists of all time
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20 years ago, Apple bought NeXT
On Dec. 20, 1996, Apple announced that it had purchased NeXT: Apple Computer, Inc. today announced its intention to purchase NeXT Software Inc., in a friendly acquisition for $400 million. Pending regulatory approvals, all NeXT products, services, and technology research will become part of Apple Computer, Inc. As…
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How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Nintendo releases original Zelda design docs
See the original The Legend of Zelda as you never have before…
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ICQ: 20 Years Is No Limit
ICQ is turning 20 (and that is no small potatoes). A whole generation has already grown up with the forerunner of all messengers. For this…
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555 timer teardown: inside the world's most popular IC
This article is translated into Vietnamese at: Bên trong chíp định thời 555 . If you've played around with electronic circuits, you prob...
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ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has transistors
Microprocessors have become immensely more complex thanks to Moore's Law, but one thing that has been lost is the ability to fully understan...
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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Slack client for Commodore 64
Slack is great. Many smarter people than me also think that Slack is great. Slack is great because its simple and easier to deal with than emails. With all t...
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Why the Apple II ProDOS 2.4 Release Is the OS News of the Year
In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in p…
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Why Do Tourists Visit Ancient Ruins Everywhere Except the United States?
In 1250, the southeastern United States was home to a city larger than London whose people built 200 huge, earthen pyramids. So why do so few people know about it?
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Iran’s exceptional reaction to 9/11 attacks (2015)
“Iran’s sympathetic response to the American tragedy has been exceptional for a country under US economic siege for two decades. Only hours after the Sept. 11 attack, President Muhammad…
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto day 8: it boots
We've been restoring a Xerox Alto from the 1970s for several months, and we finally got it to boot and run some programs! There's still so...
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DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century: