Top all-time · #1496
Bradford Morgan White
Personal blog · abortretry.fail · on HN as BirAdamhistoryhardwaresystems
Bradford Morgan White writes Abort Retry Fail, a personal blog at abortretry.fail about history, hardware and systems. Since 2022, 47 different Hacker News readers have linked it 238 times, most often “The History of ARM and Acorn”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-04, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Abort Retry Fail for long histories of computer and software companies and hardware, such as Acorn and ARM, Novell, Xenix, Tandy and Xerox. One commenter recommends its mailing list for computer history.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- Called a "good summary" of ARM history and an "excellent history of Acorn", a "good read" on Novell, and recommended for computer and software history.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- The History of ARM and Acorn5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-12-10
- The History of Xerox3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-07
- The Itanic Saga: The History of VLIW and Itanium3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-01-22
- The Berkeley Software Distribution3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-02-18
- Tandy Corporation, Part 33 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-07-11
- The Rise and Fall of Ashton-Tate (2023)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-06-09
- Inmos and the Transputer3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-11
- Nippon Electric Company3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-11-22
- The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-04
- The History of Xenix3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-12-24
What Hacker News says?
If you like computer/software history, I recommend the Abort Retry Fail[1] mailing list. [1] https://www.abortretry.fail/
Comment linking /
on “A Git story: Not so fun this time”Submitted The Rise and Fall of Silicon Graphics as a story · 346 points
HN discussionhttps://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-itanic-saga
Comment linking /p/the-itanic-saga
on “Box64 and RISC-V in 2024: What It Takes to Run the Witcher 3 on RISC-V”Submitted The QNX Operating System as a story · 322 points
HN discussionA/UX was still a licensed version of Unix. This post says the licensing fee was $1,000 per seat. https://www.reddit.com/r/Apple_AUX/comments/11wks6i/what_was... I remember the AT&T / BSD lawsuit in 1992. Maybe Apple looked at NeXTSTEP and since it is based on the Mach microkernel and BSD that they would be able to fix the 10 or so files to avoid the AT&T / Unix System Labs licensing fees like Free/NetBSD did. In the…
Comment linking /p/the-history-of-xenix
on “Windows NT for Power Macintosh”Submitted 3dfx: So powerful, it's kind of ridiculous (2023) as a story · 319 points
HN discussion> I can’t ever see a communist system coming up with an iPhone. Soviets invented a lot of things, in terms of aviation, computers, celestial navigation in intercontinental missiles. There was also an article, which I read recently but failed to find it now, about how they revolutionized mechanical watches, and came out with their own quartz movements, without copying anyone. Oh lastly, they did the "iPhone of sea go…
Comment linking /p/the-itanic-saga
on “Business Booms and Depressions Since 1775 (1943)”Submitted 'Be' is nice, end of story as a story · 313 points
HN discussionAuthor here. I don’t use Wikipedia at all. Generally, I read old magazines, books, and occasionally old websites in the Wayback machine when I can’t find other stuff. I then write. I don’t make citations as my work is meant to be neither authoritative nor academic. I research and write for my own enjoyment. As for Davies, I didn’t bring him up because I didn’t have a ton of material on him. For Xchange, I again didn…
Comment linking /p/mips-for-the-masses
on “Of Psion and Symbian”Submitted The History of S.u.S.E as a story · 243 points
HN discussionAnother article on the same site has a good summary of the history of ARM — there was plenty I wasn't aware of: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses
Comment linking /p/mips-for-the-masses
on “The British Micro Behemoth”Submitted The Berkeley Software Distribution as a story · 208 points
HN discussionSpookily I was on that site that morning, reading his excellent history of Acorn (and ARM): https://www.abortretry.fail/p/mips-for-the-masses
Comment linking /p/mips-for-the-masses
on “The British Micro Behemoth”Submitted Matrox: Graphics for Professionals as a story · 193 points
HN discussionAlso a good read: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-novell
Comment linking /p/the-history-of-novell
on “1989 Networking: NetWare 386”Submitted Of Psion and Symbian as a story · 171 points
HN discussionIf you're interested in the history of VisiCalc: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-killer-app
Comment linking /p/the-killer-app
on “VisiCalc on the Apple II”Submitted Work at the Mill: The story of Digital Equipment Corporation as a story · 170 points
HN discussionhttps://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-birth-of-windows-gaming
Comment linking /p/the-birth-of-windows-gaming
on “The origins of the steam engine (2023)”Submitted Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster as a story · 163 points
HN discussion"Several years"? Try "a decade and a half". AT&T itself ported UNIX™ to the Intel 8086 in 1978: https://www.nokia.com/bell-labs/about/dennis-m-ritchie/other... The 8086 was the first ever microprocessor to run Unix – before 68000 or anything. The first release of MS, later SCO, Xenix was 1981. https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-xenix It was later ported to the 8086 in 1983 and 80286 by 1985. https://landle…
Comment linking /p/the-history-of-xenix
on “Living my best Sun Microsystems ecosystem life in 2025”Submitted The History of Windows XP as a story · 158 points
HN discussionDoes anybody else find things like this frustrating? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 Well, it's right there in the name: AbortRetry Fail
Comment linking /p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1
on “Tandy Corporation, Part 3”Submitted The British Micro Behemoth as a story · 145 points
HN discussionDoes anybody else find things like this frustrating? https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-2 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-3 ← NOPE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-corporation-part-1 https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-tandy-cor…
Comment linking /p/tandy-corporation-part-3
on “Tandy Corporation, Part 3”Submitted The LaserDisc as a story · 128 points
HN discussionI wrote about 3dfx. Crazy thing is, it was the same people who were at SGI and then Pellucid. Additionally, ATI and Nvidia can trace their technology back to SGI… fun times. https://www.abortretry.fail/p/so-powerful-its-kind-of-ridicu...
Comment linking /p/so-powerful-its-kind-of-ridiculous
on “New RISC-V microprocessor can run CPU, GPU, and NPU workloads simultaneously”Submitted Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory as a story · 126 points
HN discussionFor Visicalc, Dan Bricklin has a few blog posts: http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm For Aston-Tate's dBase app, there's this blog post about its history: https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-ta...
Comment linking /p/the-rise-and-fall-of-ashton-tate
on “Dennis Austin, the software developer of PowerPoint, dies at 76”Submitted Intel: Winning and Losing as a story · 108 points
HN discussion
