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The Road to MS-DOS 2.0
One little step toward UNIX
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Lucasart's Afterlife
I can hardly believe I’m writing a blog post about a game that came out 27 years ago, but here we are. Lucasfilm, at one time had a gaming subsidiary called Lucasarts, and they produced somet…
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The Z80 Membership Card (2015)
The microcomputer is an incredible, revolutionary invention. Like the electric light, the printing press, and the wheel, it has changed the world. Without microcomputers, the internet, and perhaps even "life as we know it" would not be possible!
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The missing digit of Stela C
One bad thing about archeologists is that some of the successful ones get a big head. People used to think the Olmecs, who made these colossal stone heads, were contemporary with the Mayans. But in…
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A bizarre Commodore 64 peripheral, a mime, and some pretty bad ads
Two years of nightmarish smiles and makeup before anyone laid hands on Mimic Systems' actual product.
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Journey to JPEG XL: open-source experiments shaped the future of image coding
Explore how a decade of open source experiments in psychovisual modeling and compression led to JPEG XL, the future of image coding.
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The Dock on Mac, from OS 10 to macOS 27
I wrote the chapter on app icon history for The iOS App Icon Book . The other day I found an old note stashed away where I had started researching the macOS…
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MkLinux and the pimped-out Apple Workgroup Server 9150
As is typical here in the Floodgap lab, it all started so innocently: rebuilding a flaky Apple Workgroup Server 9150, the odd duck of the Wo...
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The mountain that weighed the Earth
Suppose you want to find out how much you weigh. It’s easy enough – get a scale, stand on it, and read the number. Now suppose you want to know how much the Earth weighs. You get out a scale and…hm…
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I Did Not Kill Stanley Lieber: How to Draw (With 9front)
the computer lied
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Six Characters
What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.
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The paddle wheel aircraft carriers of Lake Michigan
You’ve read the title. Aircraft carriers of where powered by what? I was just as surprised as you are, but yes, they really did exist. I now introduce you to USS Wolverine and USS Sable:
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Making Crash Bandicoot (2011)
In the summer of 1994 Naughty Dog, Inc. was still a two-man company, myself and my longtime partner Jason Rubin. Over the preceding eight years, we had published six games as a lean and mean duo, b…
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The Potomac River Midair Collision
How America’s golden age of aviation safety came to an end
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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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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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Fun things to do with your VM/370 CE machine – Fun with big computers
Fun things to do with big computers
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Pixar's True Story
The true story of Pixar's IPO and the Silicon Valley investment bankers who took a chance on Steve Jobs' passion project.
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The rise and fall of IBM's 4 Pi aerospace computers: an illustrated history
The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the...
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Getting old Macromedia Director Games to run on modern Hardware
How I got many of my childhood games running again after fighting with old Copy-Protection mechanisms
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Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
INT. WAREHOUSE - NIGHT Following my recent rants about computer generated effects ( here and here ), I thought it would be fun to look i...
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Top Web Design Styles of 1993
It is difficult to estimate how many web pages created in 1993-1994 made it into the new millenium in their premordial way. If you manage to find something that was put online that time, it would in the best case display a 1995-1996 skin. But there is a way to find pages that live for ever in 1993.