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The UX of Lego Interface Panels (2020)
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 386 posts.
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MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project 1974 (2016)
1974 MIT Aluminum Bicycle Project, we describe some of Marc’s design, the frames he and Harriet built in Shawn Buckleys IAP course, and how these played a role in the Klein vs. Cannondale patent litigation in the mid-1980s.
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Vesuvius Challenge: First letters found in new scroll
PHerc. 172 (Scroll 5) is here.
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The Art and Mathematics of Genji-Ko
You might think it’s unlikely for any interesting mathematics to arise from incense appreciation, but that’s only because you’re unfamiliar with the peculiar character of Muromachi (室町) era Japanese nobles. There has never been a group of people, in any time or place, who were so driven to display their sophistication…
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The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III . The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460…
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Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy. All Finns were r...
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Prayer, Placement, and Absolution: Peter Hristoff on Islamic Prayer Rugs (2015)
Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff meditates on the role of Islamic prayer rugs (seccades) and the role they play in his own creative output.
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Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
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It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Cassette Vision
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
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Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries
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Revisiting the DOS Memory Models
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
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FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
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The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor
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20 years of Google Scholar
Google Scholar celebrates two decades of breaking down barriers to academic research and making it accessible to everyone, everywhere.
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Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
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The Battle Line at Louvain
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
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Thomas E. Kurtz has died
CHM remembers the remarkable career and contributions of 2023 Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, who passed away on November 12, 2024.
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The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
Jungle music was found in countless games from the early 90s. This article goes over what jungle is, where it comes from, and why it was the perfect match for PlayStation & Nintendo 64 games.
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The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
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Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
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Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
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Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers
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The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Structured Text on the Internet before the World Wide Web
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Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
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A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll
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New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…