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History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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Finland adds the demoscene as a UNESCO intangible world cultural heritage
"Demoskene is an international community focused on demos, programming, graphics and sound creatively real-time audiovisual performances. [..] Subculture is an empowering and important part of identity for its members."
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Frances Allen has died
The IBM Research blog is the home for stories told by the researchers, scientists, and engineers inventing What’s Next in science and technology.
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before - with simple files written in HTML that could…
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Donald Knuth was framed
YOW! Talk My YOW! talk, "Designing Distributed Systems with TLA+", is now available! You can watch it here. Donald Knuth Was Framed The other day I was...
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British Museum makes 1.9M images available for free
The British Museum has revamped its online collections database, making over 1.9 million photos of its collection available for free online under a Creative Commons license.
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Gimp is 25 years old today
Exactly 25 years ago, Peter Mattis wrote a message to several newsgroups announcing a new image editor called GIMP.
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Photos from inside a Typhoon class submarine
Тяжелый РПКСН проекта 941 по отечественной класификации: АКУЛА,по НАТовской Typhoon/ Это РПКСН III поколения. У корабля 2 прочных корпуса расположенных параллельно и несколько прочных модулей связанных единым наружным корпусом.Он несет 20 твердотопливных БР расположенных между прочными корпусами. В…
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Origins of the youtube-dl project
As you may know, as of the time this text is being written youtube-dl’s repository at GitHub is blocked due to a DMCA takedown letter received by GitHub on behalf of the RIAA. While I cannot comment on the current maintainers' plans or ongoing discussions, in light of the claims made in that letter I thought it would…
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Why Google Did Android
What happened was, in the late stages of my career at Sun Microsystems, as we were sliding into Oracle’s loathsome embrace, I had discovered Android. The programming language was Java, and not a dorky “ME” subset. My employer was saying nice things about it , and I’d long craved something I could both carry in my…
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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!
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Symbian Won
I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. (Actually, Symbian's ownership…
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25 Years of PHP
Celebrate the PHP anniversary with JetBrains! Follow the timeline of the pivotal moments in PHP history.
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X-COM
X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase…
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Websites have evolved back to static HTML/CSS/JS files
Or, the JAM stack.
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Thank You for 20 Years of Discogs
Discogs Digs is the place to start your journey of music discovery. Explore recommendations, unique stories, guides, and more.
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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Things Unexpectedly Named After People
Unfortunately, Rocket Lab does not seem to be named after seed investor/aerospace entrepreneur Mark Rocket .
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How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet
Ethernet is everywhere, tens of thousands of hardware vendors speak and implement it. However almost every ethernet link has one number in common, the MTU:
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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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Most(ly dead) Influential Programming Languages
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of…
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The Era of the Trident Engine
About the rise and fall of Microsoft's take on the web.
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Gary Starkweather died on December 26, 2019
Gary Starkweather passed away on Dec 26, 2019 at the age of 81.
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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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Usenet – Let's Return to Public Spaces
Usenet was what the Web is missing nowadays: a genuinely public space, with unclear ownership
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Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…
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We called it RAID because it kills bugs dead
The history of defect tracking databases in Windows.