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Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 233 posts.
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Ken Thompson's Unix Password
Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.
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I Miss Microsoft Encarta
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there ...
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Why Nukemap Isn't on Google Maps Anymore
The top-secret story of why NUKEMAP switched from Google Maps to Mapbox+Leaflet.
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Building a new Windows 3.1 app in 2019: A Slack Client
In October 2019, my company SP Digital held an internal hackathon. My colleague Subhransu and I worked on a whacky idea of writing a brand-new Windows 3.1 app which was an OS released almost 30 years ago. The idea we chose was a Slack client. After all, Slack clients exist for most platforms but I’m certain one does…
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Belgian programmer solves MIT’s 20-year-old time capsule cryptographic puzzle
This week MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) announced that a 20-year-old cryptographic puzzle was just solved by a self-taught programmer from Belgium, 15 years earlier than MIT scientists expected.
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Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?
The bicycle, as we know it today, was not invented until the late 1800s. Here are some theories about why
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Debian 10 “Buster” Released
[16 Nov 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.2 released [08 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.11 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 10: 10.1 released [07 Sep 2019] Updated Debian 9: 9.10 released [27 Jul 2019] DebConf19 closes in Curitiba and DebConf20 dates announced [07 Jul 2019] Debian Edu / Skolelinux Buster — a complete…
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NSA's Backdoor Key from Lotus Notes (2002)
Before the US crypto export regulations were finally disolved the export version of Lotus Notes used to include a key escrow / backdoor feature called differential cryptography. The idea was that they got permission to export 64 bit crypto if 24 of those bits were encrypted for the NSA's public key. The NSA would then…
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Mitchell Feigenbaum (1944–2019), 4.66920160910299067185320382…
Stephen Wolfram shares his memories of mathematical physicist Mitchell Feigenbaum. Also a detailed discussion of his work and big discovery of a universal constant for functions approaching chaos via period doubling.
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Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
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Tokyo subway’s humble duct-tape typographer
With a few rolls of of duct tape and a craft knife, security guard Shuetsu Sato elevates the humble worksite sign to an art form.
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Steve Wozniak's floating point routines for the 6502
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The 3dfx Voodoo1
This article is the second entry in a series about the "3D cards of the late 90s running Quake". The first entry [1] took a look at the end of 1996 with the Rendition Vérité 1000 and its dedicated port called vQuake. Rendition had managed to beat everybody to Quake-market. For a brief period of time they had the one…
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A 30th anniversary note to Prince of Persia fans
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
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More MS-DOS Games Playable at the Internet Archive
Another few thousand DOS Games are playable at the Internet Archive! Since our initial announcement in 2015, we've added occasional new games here and there to the collection, but this will be our biggest update yet, ranging from tiny recent independent productions to long-forgotten big-name releases from decades ago…
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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A 26,000-Year Astronomical Monument Hidden in Plain Sight
The western flank of the Hoover Dam holds a celestial map that marks the time of the dam’s creation based on the 25,772-year axial precession of the earth.
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Three geeks rescue a 50-year-old IBM 360 mainframe from an abandoned building
In late April of 2019 Adam Bradley and Chris Blackburn were sitting in a pub on a Monday night when Chris happened across a somewhat unusual eBay listing for an IBM 360 Model 20. This eBay listing was unusual mainly because it didn’t actually list the computer as an IBM 360, but rather as an “seltene Anlage “Puma…
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Golden Rules for Making Money (1880)
ART OF MONEY GETTING
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Why Evernote failed to realize its potential
Evernote has been plagued by a series of managerial missteps and failed product launches. The company’s future is far from certain.
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Day of the Tentacle
Although they didn’t know one another at the time, Dave Grossman and Tim Schafer both found themselves at a similar place in life in the summer of 1989: just out of university and uncertain what to do next. Both saw the same unusual advertisement in the newspaper: an advertisement for programmers who could also write…
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The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
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