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History & Retro Computing
Any year
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It took four years until 2011’s iOS 5 gave everyone an emoji keyboard
A blog about software craft and quality
273
Rijksmuseum researchers discover new painting by Rembrandt van Rijn
Researchers at the Rijksmuseum have demonstrated that the painting Vision of Zacharias in the Temple (1633) was made by Rembrandt. They examined the work with the same advanced techniques used in Operation Night Watch , and closely compared it with other paintings by Rembrandt from the same period. Materials analysis…
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In 1985 Maxell built a bunch of life-size robots for its bad floppy ad
A rough start to what would later become one of my favorite tech ads from the 80s.
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We've freed Cookie's Bustle from copyright hell
We've stopped a persistent copyright troll who was trying to impede our work. Here's everything we learned—and how we beat them.
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I built a pint-sized Macintosh
To kick off MARCHintosh, I built this tiny pint-sized Macintosh with a Raspberry Pi Pico: This is not my own doing—I just assembled the parts to run Matt Evans' Pico Micro Mac firmware on a Raspberry Pi Pico (with an RP2040). The version I built outputs to a 640x480 VGA display at 60 Hz, and allows you to plug in a…
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Welcome (back) to Macintosh
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
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DOS Memory Management
The memory management in DOS is simple, but that simplicity may be deceptive. There are several rather interesting pitfalls that programming documentation often does not mention.
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Cash issuing terminals
In the United States, we are losing our fondness for cash. As in many other countries, cards and other types of electronic payments now dominate everyday commerce. To some, this is a loss. Cash represented a certain freedom from intermediation, a comforting simplicity that you just don't get from Visa. It's funny to…
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Tove Jansson's criticized illustrations of The Hobbit (2023)
Tove Jansson illustrated books of other appreciated authors during her career. One of them was J. R. R. Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.
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H-Bomb: A Frank Lloyd Wright typographic mystery
The famed architect made a surprising error on one of his most notable buildings — or did he? A deep dive to uncover the truth.
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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.
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Reading English from 1000 AD
The past was not as foreign as we think.
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Unsung heroes: Flickr's URLs scheme
A blog about software craft and quality
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Coding Tricks Used in the C64 Game Seawolves (2025)
An in-depth overview of some of the unusual and very advanced technical tricks used in the Commodore 64 game, Seawolves.
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Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT Following my recent rants about computer generated effects ( here and here ), I thought it would be fun to look i...
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How far back in time can you understand English?
An experiment in language change
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My 1981 adventure game is now a multimedia extravaganza
Over the last few weeks, I created a computer game set in the Arctic. Or maybe I’ve been working on it since 1981. It all depends on how you count.
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A brief history of barbed wire fence telephone networks (2024)
If you look at the table of contents for my book, Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook, you’ll see that entries on networks before/outside the internet are arranged first by underl…
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The "Crown of Nobles" Noble Gas Tube Display (2024)
In my day job I work with ion thrusters for spacecraft, which are essentially electric-powered rockets that fling Xenon gas out at super high speeds to provide thrust and allow satellites to change…
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The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
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5,300-year-old 'bow drill' rewrites story of ancient Egyptian tools
A new study reveals that Egyptians were using a mechanically sophisticated drilling tool far earlier than previously suggested.
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Fun With Pinball
Fun With Pinball small board assembly instructions explanations flipper solenoid stepper video
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How did Windows 95 get permission to put Weezer video 'Buddy Holly' on the CD?
Asking nicely, and asking a lot of people.
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Reverse Engineering the Prom for the SGI O2
mattst88's blog - Reverse Engineering the PROM for the SGI O2
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My Grandma Was a Fed – Lessons from Digitizing Hours of Childhood
In Which I go into Great Detail About Digitizing Video8 and Learn My Grandmama Lived With a Prostitute
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Rome is studded with cannon balls (2022)
Did you know that Rome is studded with cannon balls? Not many know that the city is full of sites where you can still see cannon balls. We’ll accompany you and share with you the story of the many cannon balls you can see around the city. Come and have a look for yourself! Come to Rome to see the city and its cannon…
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Unseen Footage of Atari Battlezone Arcade Cabinet Production
Note: I’ve seen some online chatter about the possibility that the footage shared in this post could be AI generated (which is pretty depressing, but here we are I suppose). I just wanted to …
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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.