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Examining circuit boards from the Space Shuttle's I/O Processor
The Space Shuttle's five 1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands o...
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History & Retro Computing
Any year
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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
One keyboard bug three decades in the making
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WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
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Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part III: Paying for It
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026118 points33 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the third part (I, IIa, IIb, III) of our honestly-who-knows-how-many part series laying out some general guidelines for how pre-modern armies are recruited, raised, equipped and paid. In th…
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An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time
PHerc. 1667, sealed since the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, has been virtually unwrapped and read from beginning to end — without ever being opened.
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Long Island's decommissioned nuclear power plant
Driving on Route-25a through East Shoreham, you’d never guess there was anything unusual about the gated road heading off toward the coast. But go down a ways… …and suddenly, it’ll appear through the trees… Long Island’s only nuclear power plant, closed and shuttered since it was decommissioned in 1994. Today, it sits…
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In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words
Starting in Word and expanding to nearly every other word processor, and even things that aren't word processors.
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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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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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The time the x86 emulator team found code so bad they fixed it during emulation
Offensive content in the eyes of a software engineer.
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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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Perlisisms (1982)
2. Functions delay binding; data structures induce binding. Moral: Structure data late in the programming process.
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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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Discovery of Cold War-era rare Eastern Bloc computers in a German hangar
In 2006, CHM curators traveled to Germany to follow a lead on an abandoned collection of historical computing artifacts. In a three-story warehouse, they found a real-world timeline of computing history. After days of exploring and assessing, they brought back nearly 2,000 items for the permanent collection.
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Vinyl succumbs to Loudness War: more than just collateral damage (2025)
The vinyl record is an analog medium. How can it be affected by the loudness war? So what’s the impact?
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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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The back cover of C++: The Language raises questions not answered by front cover
Not doing the reading.
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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…