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The story of titanium
The earth contains a lot of titanium - it’s the ninth most abundant element in the earth’s crust.
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Nintendo 3DS Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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27 years later and the Psion 3a is still wonderful (2020)
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
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The era of American computer magazines has drawn to a close
I’ve been buying a copy of Maximum PC magazine at the airport newsstand on every long-distance trip I’ve taken over the past two decades. I’m primarily a Mac user but Maximum PC, which started life as boot, bought at these … Continue reading →
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The Door Close Button
This will probably be a short one, and I know I haven't written for a while, but it has always been the case that you get what you pay for and Computers Are Bad is nothing if not affordable. Still, this is a topic on which I am moderately passionate and so I can probably stretch it to an implausible length.
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Way ahead of its time: The Remote Lounge NYC (2013)
Remembering the retro-futuristic voyeur bar that was way ahead of it's time.
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My dad built a cool thing but never boasted about it
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
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Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty
It’s 1986 and you’ve got a 31 tons of copper, in the form of a giant 46 meter tall statue, that’s looking a bit worse for wear.
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Historians have an increasingly strong incentive to tell dramatic stories
How Historians (and Others) Make Themselves Stupid
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Medieval staircases were not built going clockwise for the defender's advantage
This story has been making the rounds on the internet with a claim that you’ve probably been told during visits to castles, but, there’s no evidence for it whatsoever. In short the idea…
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When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets
SVG Phone Home
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Forty years of programming
I am about to turn forty-six. This means I have been programming for forty years, half of them professionally. During most of that time, I used a "standard" setup with 104 keyboard, a flat mouse, and a sitting desk.
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Albert Einstein in 1939 composed a message for the people of AD 6939
Preparing a time capsule in 1939, the Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company asked Albert Einstein to compose a message for the people of AD 6939. He sent this: Our time is rich in inventive minds, the inventions of which could facilitate our lives considerably. We are crossing the seas by power and utilize…
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The Death Star and the Final Trench Run (2017)
Today, @vickschutz and I learned a detail about “Star Wars” (1977); it’s totally right there but we never grasped it. — Todd Vaziri (...
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Deep Neural Nets: 33 years ago and 33 years from now (2022)
Musings of a Computer Scientist.
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The curl-wget Venn diagram
In my view, wget is not a curl competitor. It is a companion tool that has a feature overlap with curl. Use the tool that does the job. Getting the job done is the key. If that means using wget instead of curl, then that is good and I don't mind. Why would I? To … Continue reading The curl-wget Venn diagram →
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Environmental Discs of Tron Roadside Pickup
We’ve spoken about arcade Tron a few times here on the blog over the years. Specifically, I shared some development documents a few months back here. For those of you that don’t know, T…
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Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
The 80386 is the most important CPU Intel ever produced. It confirmed the importance of the x86 line and sparked a computing revolution. And yet it almost never saw the light of day. This is the history of the 386 and why it was such a landmark.
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Early Computer Art in the 50s and 60s
A deep dive on the early days of creative computing coming to life. Punch cards, plotters, light pens and lots more.
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Examining the silicon dies of the Intel 386 processor
You might think of the Intel 386 processor (1985) as just an early processor in the x86 line, but the 386 was a critical turning point for m...
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Game Boy / Color Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Don't waste money on a math coprocessor they said
Well it’s been no secret, but OS/2 6.123 on my PS/2 model 80, is insanely unstable running simple MS-DOS based games (large EXE’s)
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What the hell is Forth? (2019)
blog dot information dash superhighway dot net2023273 points123 commentsProgramming Languages details
Forth is perhaps the tiniest possible useful interactive programming language. It is tiny along a number of dimensions: The amount of c...
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Plastic Money
You will sometimes hear someone say, in a loose conceptual sense, that credit cards have money in them. Of course we know that that isn't the case; our modern plastic card payment network relies on online transactions where the balance tracking and authorization decisions happen within a financial institution that…
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HDMI ISA graphics card for vintage PCs by improving the Graphics Gremlin
HDMI is a relatively modern video connector we take for granted on modern PCs and monitors. Now vintage PCs can join in the fun too with a native connection to modern HDMI monitors without any additional adapter. (A production run has been made for this board. You can contact explit[at]mailbox[dot]org if you wish to…
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Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
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Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013)
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall s
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Ericsson to WhatsApp: The Story of Erlang
How a programming language from Sweden powered one of the most valuable startup of the 2010s.
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The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023268 points325 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Fireside this week! We actually haven’t had one of these in quite a while; we had a gap week in April but the last Fireside looks like it was in March! In any case, here we are and here’…