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The End of an Athlon
When I was researching the mess related to strange and poorly documented CPUID bits in the Athlon MP and XP processors , I had to swap a lot of CPUs. This was uneventful in most cases… but only most.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended. Every Windows 95 box has an anti-piracy hologram on the side. The photographer chose his
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Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
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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…
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A True Telnet BBS on a Casio Calculator
About a eight weeks ago I had virtually no interest in calculators. Blank, dull, tedious-looking objects that remind me of long, arduous rainy afternoons in 1980’s/1990’s school maths classes.
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Guiding Ships with Moire Patterns (2018)
I was inspired by Tom Scott’s excellent video and links here where he talks about a particular type of “Inogon” light used to guide ships through channels or harbours. The patent …
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The little-known winstart.bat batch file
It had been there long before Windows 95, but nobody remembered.
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Happy 45th Birthday to the IBM PC and Model F/XT
A celebration into the IBM PC, the Model F/XT keyboard, where it came from and what it became
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Principia Mathematica is modern and insightful
Notes on Chapter 1 of Principia Mathematica
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The Road to MS-DOS 2.0
One little step toward UNIX
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Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
The Pascal language was named after Blaise Pascal (see picture), a French mathematician who was a pioneer in computer development history. In 1641, at the age of eighteen, Pascal constructed the first arithmetical machine, arguably the first computer. He would improve upon the instrument eight years later. In 1650…
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How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
A Newspaper Classifieds Story
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Gateway 2000's hilariously bad ads in the 90s (Part II)
What started as endearingly bootstrapped marketing descended into soulless corporate sales.
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Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word
The Akihabara institution that every Japanese maker knows — run on cash, instinct, and one founder’s restless curiosity
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Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.
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Let's all meet up in the Y2K
Back in 2024 I posted a few of these on Twitter (thread reader) after digging out old photos from the dot-com boom. I was working in London at a digital agen...
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The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life
Learning from the automation dreams of the first Machine Age
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Everything I Know (1975)
Everything I Know During the last two weeks of January 1975 Buckminster Fuller gave an extraordinary series of lectures concerning his entire life’s work. Jump to Sections Introduction These …
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Windows XP 2002 for the Itanium: Unbridled rage
This is exciting news, there is a fork of Qemu that has workable Itanium Merced emulation, and it’s good enough to run Windows XP/2003! Enter Malte Kuhlmann ‘s Qemu fork of syunnPC ‘s AI Itanium infused Qemu fork .
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Twenty Years of Pandoc
A universal document converter
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The Potomac River Midair Collision
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
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The myth of Snow Leopard
It was a hot mess, but the myth is useful today.
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Twenty Years of RISC OS Open
On 20 June 2006 we incorporated RISC OS Open Ltd with one slightly mad ambition: to take a proprietary operating system and open it up to anyone who fancied helping. Twenty years on, that has largely happened, and the RISC OS of today is in far better health than the one we inherited.
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MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
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Why etymologies matter: How tracing words can illuminate history (2024)
How tracing words can illuminate history
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Unearthing my 1996 windowed OS in machine code for Am29000 homebrew computer
History of the development of my windowed operating system for 32-bit Am29000 processors when I was age 18.