1
Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize awarded: we can read the first scroll
The 2000-year-old scroll discusses music, food, and how to enjoy life’s pleasures.
2
Xkcd 1425 (Tasks) turns ten years old today
One of the all-time great XKCDs. It's amazing that "check whether the photo is of a bird" has gone from PhD-level to trivially easy to solve (with a vision LLM, …
3
A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'
The Map Happenings series on the hugely impactful events that forever changed our world. This week: the story of a little known company called ‘Etak’. I think you’ll find it a fas…
4
Google helped destroy adoption of RSS feeds (2023)
Learn how one of the biggest tech companies played a major role in the reason many people stopped using RSS feeds
5
A forged Apple employee badge
Here’s a quick and cautionary tale. This eBay auction, spotted by Eric Vitiello, immediately caught my eye: Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incred…
6
Open Sourcing DOS 4
See the canonical version of this blog post at the Microsoft Open Source Blog! ...
7
The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
Jungle music was found in countless games from the early 90s. This article goes over what jungle is, where it comes from, and why it was the perfect match for PlayStation & Nintendo 64 games.
8
Did Sandia use a thermonuclear secondary in a product logo?
I happened to look at a slide deck from Sandia National Laboratories from 2007 that someone had posted on Reddit late last night (you know, as one does,...
9
Why GitHub won
How GitHub _actually_ became the dominant force it is today, from one of it's cofounders.
10
Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
11
The Space Quest II Master Disk Blunder
There is nothing unusual about the outside of these disks, but there is something unique about the data that is stored on them, something that Sierra On-Line would have been totally unaware of and certainly wouldn’t have wanted them to include.
12
Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
13
Thomas E. Kurtz has died
CHM remembers the remarkable career and contributions of 2023 Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, who passed away on November 12, 2024.
14
Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
15
How to copy a file from a 30-year-old laptop
How do you transfer files off an Apple laptop from 1994? It's harder than it sounds!
16
Moments in Chromecast's history
Take a look back at Chromecast’s history over the past 11 years — and learn about the future of streaming TV with Google.
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18
Riven
Sometimes success smacks you right in the face. More often, it sneaks up on you from behind.
19
The UX of Lego Interface Panels (2020)
LEGO interface panels are beautiful, iconic, and great for learning interface design basics. I bought 52 of them from BrickLink to explore the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.
20
The Origins of DS_store (2006)
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
21
Inside the Super Nintendo cartridges
One of the remarkable characteristics of the Super Nintendo was the ability for game cartridges (cart) to pack more than instructions and assets into ROM chips. If we open and look at the PCBs, we can find inside things like the CIC copy protection chip, SRAM, and even "enhancement processors".
22
How many bathrooms have Neanderthals in the tile?
A Reddit poster finds an ancient jaw in his parents' new travertine. It may be more common than most people imagine.
23
The capacitor that Apple soldered incorrectly at the factory
There have been some past rumblings on the internet about a capacitor being installed backwards in Apple’s Macintosh LC III . The LC III was a “pizza box” Mac model produced from early 1993 to early 1994, mainly targeted at the education market. It also manifested as various consumer Performa models: the 450, 460…
24
Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
25
Boris Vallejo and the pixel art of the demoscene
Boris Vallejo is an epic fantasy painter, who has had an immense influence on fantasy book covers, computer game box art, and even the demoscene. Throughout the decades, his works have often been replicated by pixel artists, leading to controversy. I rediscovered Vallejo's great work for myself, looked into the…
26
How photos were transmitted by wire in the 1930s
I didn’t know what to expect from this 1937 video explanation of how wire photos were transmitted to newspapers, but a double stunt sequence featuring an airpla
27
Original WWW proposal is a Word for Macintosh 4 file from 1990, can we open it?
The W3C has a page with the original WWW proposal from Tim Berners-Lee. One of the downloads says The original document file (I think - I ...
28
Buy payphones and retire
Dropshipping AliExpress watches, AI-generated SEO spam websites... marginally legal and ethical passive income schemes, that serve to generate that income mostly for their promoters, can feel like a modern phenomenon. The promise of big money for little work is one of the fundamental human weaknesses, though, and it…
29
The Internet Archive's last-ditch effort to save itself
Connect with Lunduke and other members of Lunduke community
30
Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps
A lot of computing got done even before we had stacks and heaps.