I know Apple pushed the original Macintosh as "easy to use" but specifically calling out the familiarity of the *keyboard connector* seems a bit much. (from BYTE Magazine, June 1984: https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1984-06-rescan/page/n1/mode/2up )

RE: https://mastodon.social/@todbot/116206660856984042 I wish I'd had a shortwave radio and this information when I was a kid, getting weather maps from thin air on my computer would have seemed like magic.

I made a slight update to my Decker recreation of the original Doom's "screen-melting" transition animation - now it's sufficiently optimised that it can animate 1-pixel-wide strips falling down, instead of 2-pixel or 4-pixel-wide strips. The default is still 2-pixel, though, to avoid dropping […]

In the late 1990s, Pangea Software was a leading developer of Mac-exclusive games. Apple commissioned them to write demonstration code for the first release of the Quickdraw 3D graphics API, and their subsequent games Nanosaur, Bugdom, and Cro-Mag Rally were […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

"Happiness is a Warm Gun", by the Beatles - the first progressive rock song? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIR6AAjEg5U

"At the time we wrote Appler we of course knew that the colors are supposed to be purple, blue, green, and orange, but we had never seen them displayed by an actual physical computer, because the Apple ][ displays that were available in Bulgaria were all monochrome-green. Alex looked at the […]

``` The following package was automatically installed and is no longer required: libplacebo351 Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove it. ``` Was it *ever* required, though? Really?

All my life I've heard people referencing the line "music soothes the savage beast", from adventure games to cartoons where a cat plays a violin to get past a guard dog. Apparently, that's a typo. The original quotation is from the first line of William Congreve's 1697 play, *The Mourning […]

"They Might Beat Giygas", a mashup album with music from the 1995 SNES game Earthbound, and lyrics from various They Might Be Giants songs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzHwnaK1c7c #tmbg #earthbound #mashup

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stonetoolsblog/116071488450412028 Back in the 1980s, technology was advancing so quickly that every other year seemed to produce new hardware that needed new operating systems and new applications, promising new never-before-seen capabilities. But today the pace has […]

LiveJournal just e-mailed me to say I've had an account for 23 years. I didn't even realise they were still around.

RE: https://teh.entar.net/@ckape/116054902644960496 I bet there's still people using FidoNet out there somewhere. Do the email/Fido gateways still exist? I wonder if anybody's using it as their primary communication medium...

So, are there non-matrix.org Matrix servers accepting public sign-ups? Or do you pretty much have to run a server yourself, or pay someone to do it for you? #Matrix

If you have some SD cards lying around and want a slightly-more retro-tech aesthetic... https://charlyn.codes/floppy-stickers/

You might remember a few months ago, Linus Akesson released a C64 demo called "Nine" that featured a magician character that summoned nine on-screen sprites from his hat (the C64 only supports 8 sprites per scanline in hardware). Today the demo groups Fairlight and Genesis Project released […]

I've been enjoying some Fancy Tea I got for Christmas. I don't know much about Fancy Tea, but my impression was that black tea is generally served with milk, and green tea or things with lemon do not go so well. So it's weird to me that the Fancy Tea with oolong (approximately black tea) […]

Massive shout-out to this guy on Reddit, who figured out why Firefox couldn't prevent the screen from turning off when running under the Sway Wayland compositor, and also how to get it working. Lots of people just put up with it, or grumbled about GNOME or Firefox being buggy, but this guy […]

Welcome to 2026, and welcome to another round of classic artworks entering the public domain! This year (in America) works from 1930 and before have become legally available. If you don't happen to have memorised the copyright dates of your favourite books and movies, the Center for the Study of […]

The first time I played DOOM in the 1990s, the first thing that amazed me was the transition from the title-screen to starting a new game - No loading screen, no tasteful fade-to-black, but the menu you'd just been using crumbled away revealing the level running behind it - it set the tone of […]

Moravia (the current owner of the HP calculator IP) has announced they'll be making a Collector's Edition of the 16C RPN programmer's calculator next year: https://youtu.be/vwgQu2s7rxY?t=1185 HP made dozens of scientific and business calculators over the years, but they only ever made one […]

Today I learned: in 1919, the Treaty of Versailles formally ended World War I, establishing the A note above middle C as a frequency of 435 Hz. In 1939, an international conference recommended that the note's frequency be changed to 440Hz, and World War II broke out […]

Mathematicians occasionally uses "tack" symbols, ⊥ and ⊤, for various purposes. They're called that because they look like thumb-tacks from the side. But if you need a particular tack, what do you call it? Is "⊥" the "up" tack, because the pointy bit is up? Or is "⊤" the "up" tack, because it's […]

I love that Free Software means people can make the things they want to make in the fashion they want to make them without having to get permission from other people. And yet, it's stressful when I want to contribute to some project and I can't figure out whether my contribution would be […]

I'm more than the sum of my experiences, I'm the *product* of my experiences.

Today I learned that Magic: The Gathering had a miniseries of cards with pixel art. https://scryfall.com/search?order=set&q=e%3Asld+cn%E2%89%A5325+cn%E2%89%A4329&unique=prints

Could the 2006 Pixar movie "Cars" be set in the far future of the 1965 NBC TV series "My Mother the Car"? In this essay, I will...

GAR. ``` $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $((x * 2))' 8 $ /bin/bash -c 'x="2 + 2"; echo $(($x * 2))' 6 ``` bash(1) says "All tokens in the expression undergo parameter and variable expansion, command substitution, and quote removal" which I *think* is meant to imply that you can use a variable […]

From a 1982 text adventure, "Marooned" (h/t @jdyer)

I spent some time messing around with Snow, a new low-level emulator for classic 68k Macintoshes. It doesn't support hard-drive images from Basilisk II (the most widely-used 68k Macintosh emulator), so I had to make a fresh, blank hard-drive image, grab some […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

Today I learned why magnets were horseshoe-shaped, and why we don't do that anymore: https://www.kjmagnetics.com/blog/why-horseshoe-shaped-magnets

From the Olean Herald, New York, on the 13th of September, 1884 (page 7, column 4), presumably quoted from a newspaper called the London Graphic.

A lovely review of desktop icons from the 1990s and before: https://www.datagubbe.se/icons/ #PixelArt #retrocomputing

Today I learned that one Michael Sharpe made an OpenType version of Algol, the font commissioned from Adrian Frutiger for the ALGOL 68 report, and never seen again. Homepage: https://ctan.org/pkg/algolrevived OTF downloads: https://ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/algolrevived/opentype #typography

Seems like things have been getting a bit quiet on Mastodon of late, I guess some of the people I followed when I joined have moved on to other things. I guess it's time to start following more hashtags, and following interesting people who get boosted onto my timeline.

Wizards of the Coast did as they promised, and released a System Reference Document (that is, the basic rules and game mechanics) for the 2024 edition of Dungeons & Dragons under an extremely open Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0) licence. https://www.dndbeyond.com/srd D&D isn't necessarily the […]

Free42, the Free Software re-implementation of the classic HP 42s RPN calculator, supports using custom skins, a bit like WinAmp skins but more complex - instead of just a bunch of bitmaps, you get to define the size and location of each button and graphical […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

#discord stopped working for me in @firefoxnightly, the devtools complained about NS_ERROR_HTTP2_FALLBACK_TO_HTTP1 while making a websocket connection. I thought the websocket protocol didn't support HTTP2, and apparently that *used* to be the case but Firefox Nightly now supports it, and […]

As a professional programmer, I don't have much cause to use a desktop calculator when I'm sitting in front of a computer with a squillion times more processing power and a richer, more versatile interface. But I came across this video of somebody running the firmware of the HP 50g graphing […]

'The cover of MAD magazine No. 258 from October 1985 announces a “special computer section featuring the MAD Computer Program”.' Somebody typed in all the source-code to draw your own vectorised Alfred E. Neuman on your 8-bit microcomputer of choice, so you can render it yourself. They also […]

OK, yeah, it comes with all the trappings of commercialised high art, but that is the most gorgeous 32×32 1-bit Great Wave pixel art I've ever seen. https://aspreystudio.com/collections/esc-keys-by-susan-kare-computer-keys/products/susan-kare-wave-icon-computer-key #PixelArt #susankare

Today I released a new version of bdflib, my Python library for working with bitmap fonts in the BDF format (commonly used on Unix systems). New in this version is the `bdflib.effects.expand()` function and the `bdflib-expand` command-line tool, which can be used to aspect-correct a BDF font […]

I've done a few retro-font projects over the years, and even wrote my own Python library to handle BDF files, thinking that I might someday make a tool for converting between different font formats, and maybe even editing them. It turns out that in the years since, modern OSs have stopped […]

Today I learned: the "E-Reader" hardware for Nintendo's Game Boy Advance let you load data (levels, artwork, etc.) into games that supported it, but also allowed you to load completely original programs. The GBA's ARM7TDMI CPU was powerful, but code size is a problem when your program has to be […]

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be inside a bag of cornflakes, Wikipedia provides a 360° panoramic photograph to inspire you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Inside_a_cornflakes_bag_%E2%80%93_360%C2%B0_photo.jpg

Are you nostalgic for using a CRT terminal in the 90s? Or maybe curious about what things looked like before high-DPI displays and true-colour graphics? I've extracted the fonts from the firmware of the DEC VT320, a CRT terminal first produced in 1987, and […] [Original post on teh.entar.net]

To help out @vga256 I'm writing a program to extract the font from the DEC VT320 firmware. It's going pretty well, I've got all the glyphs for the 80-column mode, and I figured out how to correct for the VT320's extremely non-square pixels, so it looks quite readable.

This looks like the original source of that "If OpenSSL were a GUI" image going around: https://smallstep.com/blog/if-openssl-were-a-gui/

From the perspective of 2025, it's wild that the Unix `diff` utility (which takes an old and a new file, and prints the differences) and the Unix `patch` utility (which takes an old file and the output of `diff`, and prints the new file) were not only written by different people, but *a decade […]

Just got my first glyph contribution for my Unicode version of the Amiga Topaz font: U+1E9E ẞ Latin Capital Letter Sharp S. https://heckmeck.de/blog/a-capital-sharp-s-for-topaz/ #typography #retrocomputing