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Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters
Adventures in vintage computers and retrogaming. Includes articles on classic games and obsolete computers.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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8086 Microcode Disassembled
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
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Bullfrog After Populous
I’ll give you an analogy of what Populous is in my mind. Imagine if I had a blank canvas. Some people that are true artists will take a palette of paint and mix them together and carefully handcraft each and every single brushstroke until they have some beautiful and amazing picture. And then there’s me. I had the…
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Addendum: Rice
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020111 points53 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As an addendum on to our four-part look at the general structures of the farming of cereal g…
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A Requiem for a Dying Operating System (1994)
These views generally result in my being labeled a Luddite by the Unix priesthood. But Ned Ludd was right --- the new machines did not make conditions better for ordinary working folk: the people whose conditions were immediately improved were those who owned the machinery, and whose profits thereby increased…
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Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Inside the HP Nanoprocessor
The Nanoprocessor is a mostly-forgotten processor developed by Hewlett-Packard in 1974 1 as a microcontroller 2 for their products. Stra...
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Unix Wars (2000)
Unix Wars
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Gerät 32620: the machine that powered numerous number stations
A few years ago, I first stumbled over some recordings of number stations and started reading up on their history. For most of them, we have pretty good guesses who ran them and for what purpose. One example is the Gongs and Chimes Station , known for its melody that got increasingly creepy over the years, the more…
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Bits of History, Words of Advice
"Why do you jackasses use these inferior linguistic vehicles when we have something here that’s so precious, so elegant, which gives me so ...
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Why are there 5280 feet in a mile? (2009)
The original Roman mile was 1000 paces (milia passuum), or 5000 feet. The modern mile was defined as 5280 feet under Queen Elizabeth at the end of the 16th century in order to reconcile multiple di…
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Exploring mullender.c – A deep dive into the first IOCCC winner
This post will explore the famous winner of the first IOCCC contest, dive into the story behind the code, and even display the original source programs!
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The Legend of GayBlade
The recently released video game documentary High Score includes a sequence in the third episode about a game called GayBlade. GayBlade is one of the first commercially-sold LGTBQ-themed video games, a role-playing romp for Windows and Macintosh occasionally referred to as "Dungeons and Drag Queens". Once thought to…
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Knuth versus Email (1999)
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I'd used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
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Reverse-engineering the 8086's Arithmetic/Logic Unit from die photos
The Intel 8086 processor was introduced in 1978, setting the course of modern computing. While the x86 processor family has supported 64-b...
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Teletext Bad Apple
Acorn, BBC Micro and Retro Computer Code & Demos
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Bread, How Did They Make It? Part IV: Markets, Merchants and the Tax Man
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020112 points12 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
Thanks to our helpful volunteer narrator, this entire post series is now also available in audio format! As the fourth and final part (I, II, III) of our look at the basic structure of food product…
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Why Did Mozilla Remove XUL Add-Ons?
TL;DR: Firefox used to have a great extension mechanism based on the XUL and XPCOM. This mechanism served us well for a long time. However, it came at an ever-growing cost in terms of maintenance for both Firefox developers and add-on developers. On one side, this growing cost progressively killed any effort to make…
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Lost Advanced Civilizations
Did life on Earth start on Earth, or did it start on Mars and move to Earth?
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A 35-year-old bug in Patch found in efforts to restore 29-year-old BSD
A 35 Year Old Bug in Patch. Larry Wall posted patch 1.3 to mod.sources on May 8, 1985. A number of versions followed over the years. It's b...
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Using machine learning to recreate photorealistic portraits of Roman Emperors
Artistic interpretations of the 54 Roman emperors of the Principate, created with AI and historical references.
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How the 8086 processor handles power and clock internally
One under-appreciated characteristic of early microprocessors is the difficulty of distributing power inside the integrated circuit. While...
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Connecting a Macintosh SE to the Internet with a Raspberry Pi
How to connect a 68k Mac to the internet without an ethernet card!
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How We Got the Favicon (2017)
The favicon was a total experiment, the result of a bit of serendipity and luck.
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The Forgotten Ones: HP Nanoprocessor
Original Nanoprocessor prototypes from 1974-75. Note hand written wafer number, open die cover and early part number (94332)