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Japanese symbols that speak without words
I look at the Japanese symbols that carry meaning entirely on their own.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time
On the March 10, 2025 episode of Do You Speak Tech?, I sat down with two names woven into the early fabric of modern computing: Larry Masinter and Frank
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The last Romans are still around
For some of us, our Roman Empire actually is the Roman Empire. As far as pre-modern states go, the Roman Empire was incredibly powerful, culturally influential, and well documented. Rome’s expansio…
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Munich 1991: The Roots of the Current AI Boom
1991: T and P of ChatGPT, distillation, deep residual learning, LSTM, GAN
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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000
I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I'm mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.
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How Japan's railways stayed one while splitting apart
When Japan broke up its national railway in 1987, the new companies agreed on one thing to keep the same.
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Egyptian Fractions (2006)
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
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Rome Fell and Nobody Noticed
A barbarian heretic kept the Roman state running for thirty-three years
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How did Atari apply side art to Arcade Cabinets?
One of the most fascinating sequences in Atari’s arcade manufacturing process in the early 80s, was the application of the fabulous artwork that adorned all of its cabinets from the golden ag…
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Running DOS on Behringers DDX3216 with a DIY x86-Bios from Scratch
In 1994 I got my first computer: an Intel i486 DX2-66 with 4 MB RAM and a 512MB harddisk. The software was IBMs OS/2 and Microsofts Windows 3.11. In the next four years I was upgrading this machine every few months with more RAM (up to 16MB), a CD-ROM-drive and a soundblaster card. So I learned upgrading this machine…
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The Last Surviving Japanese Porsche 912 Police Car
Oof, what a beauty. In the 1960s, four Porsche 912s were customized for use as police cars in Japan. This one, which was used in Kanagawa until 1973, is the onl
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Emacs appearances in pop culture
Thank you for the support, this blog post got featured on the front page of Hacker News (YCombinator).
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Vacuum-Form Signage
Branding Main Street America and a rabbit hole into the history behind the vacuum-formed signage found in our daily lives
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Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026182 points52 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems te…
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Win16 Memory Management
This is a kind of knowledge base article which resulted from attempts to understand exactly how memory management works in 16-bit Windows. It is not exactly undocumented, but it is also not well documented; even before Windows 3.0 appeared, the assumption was that essentially all application developers were going to…
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C++: The Documentary
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
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Retro-Tech Parenting
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Nitpicking the shell history scene in 'Tron: Legacy'
In the 2010 film Tron: Legacy , there's a scene where the main character Sam Flynn sits down at a computer in his father’s study, and types some commands to try to figure out what Flynn senior had last been working on, before mysteriously disappearing.
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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:...
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Snowboard Kids 2 is 100% Decompiled
Snowboard Kids 2 for the Nintendo 64 has reached 100% matching decompilation. A brief note on what that means, how we got here, and what comes next.
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A few interesting modern pixel fonts
A blog about software craft and quality
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Childhood Computing
I recently stumbled upon a nice blog post titled Childhood Computing . It made me think about my own childhood computing experience. I am much older than the author of the aforementioned post, but like them, I too love computers. I have for most of my life.
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The C64 Dead Test Font
A deep dive into the font of the “Dead Test” diagnostic cartridge of the C64, including an Easter egg, a look into the implementation, and, finally, some Commodore 8-bit character ROMs for download.
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Reverse engineering circuitry in a Spacelab computer from 1980
Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and exper...
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80386 microcode disassembled
After I posted 8086 microcode disassembled , Ken Shirriff sent me a high-resolution image of the microcode ROM from the 80386. I didn’t expect I would ever do anything with it for a couple of reasons: one is that it’s absolutely huge (94720 bits) compared to the 8086 one (10752 bits) so (even with bitract or similar)…
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Gnutella: A Protocol Outliving the World That Created It
Gnutella Explanation
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The History of ThinkPad: From IBM’s Bento Box to Lenovo’s AI Workstations
A sourced history of ThinkPad from IBM's 1992 700C to Lenovo's 2026 AI workstations: TrackPoint, keyboards, X-series, T-series and P-series.