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How Markdown took over the world
A blog about making culture. Since 1999.
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We found an undocumented bug in the Apollo 11 guidance computer code
How a specification surfaced a defect in the Apollo flight code.
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Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story
100% cotton paper. 100% crazy.
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Tell NYT, Atlantic, USA Today to keep Wayback Machine
The news isn’t getting preserved in the Wayback Machine anymore because major media outlets are blocking it.
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Late Bronze Age Collapse
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026432 points316 commentscited by 4History & Retro Computing details
This week, by order of the ACOUP Senate, we’re talking about the Late Bronze Age Collapse (commonly abbreviated ‘LBAC’), the shocking collapse of the Late Bronze Age state system …
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The electromechanical angle computer inside the B-52 bomber's star tracker
Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate? One important technique was celestial navigation: navigating from the positions of the stars, planets...
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C++: The Documentary
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
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Twenty Years of Pandoc
A universal document converter
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Quake – 30th Anniversary Update
To celebrate the 30th Anniversary of Quake, we have collaborated with MachineGames to create a new episode, Dawn of the Machine, now available as a free update to Quake.
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A few interesting modern pixel fonts
A blog about software craft and quality
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Emacs appearances in pop culture
Thank you for the support, this blog post got featured on the front page of Hacker News (YCombinator).
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IBM didn't want Microsoft to use the Tab key to move between dialog fields
I want to speak to your manager.
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Deus Ex
A slight shift of focus, and the future could still turn out like Deus Ex after all…
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Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
Archaeologists have uncovered a royal archive of cuneiform tablets in the ancient Hittite city of Samuha, modern-day Sivas, central Turkey. This year’s excavation unearthed 131 cuneiform tablets and fragments which record an epidemic of fever, military logistics, religious practices and events of royal daily life…
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My favourite PowerMac is a Nintendo Wii
So today I reached a nice milestone in one of my projects: my work porting classic Mac OS to PowerPC systems with what I affectionately call ArtX chipsets (Nintendo GameCube, Wii, eventually Wii U; the GameCube’s Flipper integrated chipset was very much designed by ArtX as it was effectively finished when ATI acquired…
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What algorithm did Windows XP use to choose your initial user picture?
It's random, really.
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Commodore 64 released September 1, 1982
A generation of technology workers grew up using it
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Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone (2003)
It seems that no matter what you do, somebody will get offended. Every Windows 95 box has an anti-piracy hologram on the side. The photographer chose his
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The curious case of retro demo scene graphics
The demo scene has a peculiar view on copyright . It roughly boils down to a system of effort - effort in ideas, effort in craft - where the scene polices itself and punishes sceners that steal outright from other sceners. Theft from the outside world, however, is often taken lightly - especially when it comes to…
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Space Cadet Pinball on Linux
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
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Retro-Tech Parenting
I am a technologist. I enjoy the things that computers and digital devices can do–they often seem magical and amazing! As a technologist, I have a particular vantage point to see and be very uncomfortable with what companies are doing with that technology. There are catchphrases for these patterns: AdTech…
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Fast16: High-precision software sabotage 5 years before Stuxnet
A previously unknown 2005 cyber sabotage framework patches high-precision calculation software in memory to silently corrupt results.
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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Software is degrading all around us, for obvious reasons. I've written about this before. All else equal, if you increase your code production by 10x but you don't reduce your error rate by a factor of 10, then your production app is buggier than it used to be. I've seen threads where people also have...
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Beauty in DVD Menus
The best part of digital video disc isn't the video.
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Welcome (back) to Macintosh
For at least 10 years, every Time Machine set up I have been in charge of, or tasked with maintaining for someone else, has eventually run into an issue where it stops backing up successfully. The only solution has been to start over, to not inherit backup state and to manually delete the old backup. My experience…
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Finger: the 1971 social network that never died
It will surprise more than a few of you to hear that the first social network dates back to 1971. No accounts, no algorithm, no central server. Your…
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The Secret Life of Circuits
Some pics, endorsements, and the reason the book exists in the first place.
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The Eternal Promise: A History of Attempts to Eliminate Programmers
From COBOL in the 1960s to AI in the 2020s, every generation promises to eliminate programmers. Explore the recurring cycles of software simplification hype.