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ZX Spectrum graphics magic
Hey friends! (Or just curious readers peeking under the hood of good old retro games).
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Who invented deep residual learning?
Who invented residual neural networks?
2614
Looking Back on 35 Years as an Amiga User
Thirty five years ago I became an Amiga user. One of the first, actually. This is a meandering and reminiscent post of sorts, written to mark the Amiga’s 35th birthday and the 35 years I have known and loved the … Continue reading →
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Business Wargames: Early Complex Text Games
The quest for the earliest transcript of a computer game uncovers a surprisingly complex computer strategy game from the 1950s.
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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 …
2617
Microsoft Space Simulator (Or, Charles Guy’s Galaxy in a Box)
It had been one hell of a year for the United States and most of the rest of the Western world — a year of rampant chaos and conflict at home and abroad, when the very foundations of democratic society seemed on the verge of crumbling to dust. In the course of twelve months, a brutal war with no prospect of ending had…
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Amiga 2000 – Codename: Tesseract (2021)
Amiga 2000 - codename Tesseract - the first part of a series of posts about building an Amiga 2000 from scratch and adding mods to it.
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Tabbed out on the Oregon Trail
Powell's is rightly famed as a destination for book lovers, and I finally made my pilgrimage last weekend. The perils of air travel limited the inevitable splurge -- I had to fit my haul into a single backpack -- but I wound up with some nifty ...
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C Programming on System 6 – Intro [video]
I've been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling's excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I'd start screencasting some of my work.
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A database of SMS cards: The technology inside IBM's 1960s mainframes
IBM's mainframes of the 1960s are based on an interesting technology - Standard Modular System cards or SMS cards. These cards, created in ...
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The unusual bootstrap drivers inside the 8086 microprocessor chip
The 8086 microprocessor is one of the most important chips ever created; it started the x86 architecture that still dominates desktop and ...
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Hal Finney Was Not Satoshi Nakamoto
A compilation of evidence that Hal Finney and Satoshi Nakamoto were different people.
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The Sad Saga of the 500 MHz Power Mac G4
In August 1999, Apple announced the first Power Mac G4: 1 The Power Mac G4 is powered by the revolutionary new PowerPC G4 chip architected by Apple, Motorola and IBM, and is the first personal computer in history to deliver supercomputer-level performance of over one billion floating-point operations per second. The…
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The History of Windows 95
The Dawn of Microsoft's Golden Age
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1980: MUD
The story of how dozens of British college students would stay up all night to adventure together in the game that would spawn a thousand sequels.
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Recreating Medieval English Ales (1998)
In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could…
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Hawking Hawking
There’s a very good new book about Stephen Hawking that just came out, Charles Seife’s Hawking Hawking. Some detailed reviews can be found at Prospect Magazine (Philip Ball) and the New…
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“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
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The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Mainframes as a lifestyle choice
I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…
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The most expensive typefaces (2019)
The most expensive typeface I encountered is JHA Bodoni Ritalic, at €4,401.99 (almost $5,000) for a single font.
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The Mortgaging of Sierra Online
The Sierra Online of the 1980s and very early 1990s excelled at customer relations perhaps more than anything else. Through the tours of their offices (which they offered to anyone who cared to make the trip to rural Oakhurst, California), the newsletter they published (which always opened with a folksy editorial from…
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Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
The Renaissance history of automimesis, and a proposal for research
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Spider-Man (Neversoft) Decompilation Project Progress Checkpoint – May 2024
Progress report for the Spider-Man decompilation project
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Loom: How Brian Moriarty Proved That Less Is Sometimes More
In April of 1988, Brian Moriarty of Infocom flew from the East Coast to the West to attend the twelfth West Coast Computer Faire and the first ever Computer Game Developers Conference. Hard-pressed from below by the slowing sales of their text adventures and from above by parent company Activision’s ever more…