1
Margaret Hamilton has died
Margaret H. Hamilton, a profoundly influential computer scientist best known for leading the software engineering team at MIT’s Instrumentation Lab during NASA’s Apollo program, died at age 90.
Topics /
History & Retro Computing
The most popular blog posts about history & retro computing on Hacker News. 325 posts.
2
Tony Hoare has died
Turing Award winner and former Oxford professor Tony Hoare passed away last Thursday at the age of 92. Hoare is famous for quicksort, ALGO...
3
An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
4
Fable 5.1 Solves the Cyphral Distich, a 370-year-old cipher
Explore Claude Fable 5.1's proposed solution to Sir Thomas Urquhart's Cyphral Distich, a centuries-old cipher, with the reasoning behind the result.
5
Where the goblins came from
How goblin outputs spread in AI models: timeline, root cause, and fixes behind personality-driven quirks in GPT-5 behavior.
6
Why so many control rooms were seafoam green (2025)
The Color Theory Behind Industrial Seafoam Green
7
Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day , I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted.
8
Defeating a 40-year-old copy protection dongle
That’s right — this little device is what stood between me and the ability to run an even older piece of software that I recently unearthed during an expedition of software archaeology.
9
How far back in time can you understand English?
An experiment in language change
10
Daft Punk Easter Egg in the BPM Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
Was Daft Punk Having a Laugh When They Chose the Tempo of Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger?
11
Floppy disks turn out to be the greatest TV remote for kids
Modern TVs are very poorly suited for kids. They require using complicated remotes or mobile phones, and navigating apps that continually try to lure you into watching something else than you intended to. The usual scenario ends up with the kid feeling disempowered and asking an adult to put something on. That…
12
What Sun got wrong
We have the whole Oxide team coming to Emeryville this week for our annual OxCon meetup. For a remote company, an in-person meeting is uniquely energizing, and in preparation for that, we made some t-shirts featuring Oxide logos that are an homage to past computer companies.
13
Before GitHub
Open Source before GitHub was reputation-driven and full of friction
14
Television is 100 years old today
» email me » follow me on twitter » follow the blog on twitter » follow the blog on Bluesky » follow the blog on RSS
15
Miscellanea: The War in Iran
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
16
In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
17
Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2026 was awarded to Francis Halzen "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin"
18
Blocking Internet Archive Won't Stop AI, but Will Erase Web's Historical Record
Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months. The Internet Archive—the world’s largest digital library—has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s....
19
A 26,000-year astronomical monument hidden in plain sight (2019)
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.
20
Fixing the Portobello Police Station Clock
I got a message from a friend today which read along the lines of "I know we were going to meet in Edinburgh today, but do you fancy meeting in Portobello instead and trying to fix the clock in the old police station with me?"
21
Oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11
A blog post about finding the oldest Windows application with a GUI that still runs on Windows 11
22
NetHack 5.0.0
NetHack 5.0 is an enhancement to the dungeon exploration game NetHack, which is a distant descendent of Rogue and Hack, and a direct descendent of NetHack 3.6.
23
The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
24
Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay
The Nobel Peace Prize 2026 was awarded to Navanethem Pillay "for her efforts to promote peace and international law"
25
Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too full
In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium , was a CD-ROM drive . With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed…
26
The Beam Engine
See how a beam engine works through interactive 3D figures exploring steam, pressure, Watt's condenser, valves, linkages, and the governor.
27
SimCity 3k in 4k (2025)
SimCity 3000 is the best SimCity. Its only problem is that it doesn't run well on contemporary systems. Not to worry, here's a complete guide to a perfect game of SimCity 3000 on modern Windows:...
28
A History of IDEs at Google
Laurent Le Brun's blog
29
The Pentagon Threatened Pope Leo XIV's Ambassador with the Avignon Papacy
The Free Press has documented a closed-door Pentagon meeting in which a senior Trump official lectured Pope Leo XIV’s ambassador on American military supremacy.
30
All 12 moonwalkers had "lunar hay fever" from dust smelling like gunpowder (2018)
When the Apollo astronauts returned from the Moon, the dust that clung to their spacesuits made their throats sore and their eyes water. Lunar dust is made of sharp, abrasive and nasty particles, but how toxic is it for humans?