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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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Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
In a letter recently published in a new book, A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong, a teacher wrote a letter to the first human to set foot on the Moon a
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Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA
" As I recall, those two chips were fairly large. And fairly late -- to the marketplace. We had lots of issues with them. [...] Sometimes th...
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Inside a Titan missile guidance computer
I've been studying the guidance computer from a Titan II nuclear missile. This compact computer was used in the 1970s to guide a Titan II ...
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What Happened in the 2010s
My friend Steve Kane suggested I take a longer view in my pair of year end posts this year: What, no decade end/decade ahead posts? 😕 — Steven Kane (@stevenkane) December 26, 2019 And so I will. Here are the big things that happened in tech, startups, business, and more in the decade that is […]
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Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
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Apple's long processor journey
There have been multiple generations of Macs. Apple has not really divided them up. 1. Original 680x0 Macs with 24-bit ROMs (ending with the SE/30, Mac II, IIx IIcx) 2. 32-bit-clean-ROM 680x0 Macs (starting with the Mac IIci) 3. NuBus-based PowerMacs (6100, 7100, 8100) 4. OldWorld-ROM…
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The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
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Tihle: A new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators
Today I’m publishing tihle, a new emulator targeting TI graphing calculators (currently only the 83+, but maybe others later). There’s rather a lot to say about it, but here I will discuss the motivation for a new emulator and the state of the art followed by technical notes on the design and initial development…
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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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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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Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Looking inside a vintage Soviet TTL logic integrated circuit
This blog post examines a 1980s chip used in a Soyuz space clock. The microscope photo below shows the tiny silicon die inside the package, ...
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The core memory inside a Saturn V rocket's computer
The Launch Vehicle Digital Computer (LVDC) had a key role in the Apollo Moon mission, guiding and controlling the Saturn V rocket. Like most...
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Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
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Why Adventure Games Suck (1989)
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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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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Extracting ROM constants from the 8087 math coprocessor's die
Intel introduced the 8087 chip in 1980 to improve floating-point performance on the 8086 and 8088 processors, and it was used with the ori...
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1,700-Year-Old Board Game Found in Norwegian Burial Mound
Rare elongated dice and board game pieces from the Roman Iron Age have been discovered in western Norway. Last month, Norwegian archaeologists chose to excavate the remains of a small Early Iron Age grave cairn
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The Shareware Scene, Part 4: Doom
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D ‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid…
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The Intel 8086 processor's registers: from chip to transistors
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop and...
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Television: It’s Called a Medium Because It’s Never Well Done
Groucho Marx? Fred Waring? Ed Gardner? Goodman Ace? Jane Ace? Fred Allen? Ernie Kovacs? Deane Binder? Anonymous?
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Lisp Comes of Age (1980)
A report on the 1980 LISP conference at Stanford University, held the week after the AAAI Artificial Intelligence Conference. Written for Byte.
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Hoare’s Rebuttal and Bubble Sort’s Comeback
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
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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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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
You advocate a ( ) solar ( ) lunar ( ) atomic approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why: ( ) solar years are real and the calendar year needs to sync with them ( ) solar days are real and the calendar day needs to sync with them ( ) the so...
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Unix Wars (2000)
Unix Wars