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Craig Hickman tells how a frustrated preschooler using MacPaint led him to write Kid Pix: design principles, wacky brushes, the Undo Guy, freeware then Broderbund, and how the program became a worldwide hit after John Sculley demoed it at MacWorld.
16 min · 3,696 words
“Men with Queer Nerves”: The Jumping Frenchmen of Maine
Ross Bullen writes for The Public Domain Review about the French-Canadian lumberjacks around Maine's Moosehead Lake who, at the slightest stimulus, would jump, strike out or mimic languages they could not speak, and about neurologist George M. Beard, who first wrote about them in an 1878 essay and linked their behavior to religious frenzy and neurasthenia.
16 min · 3,760 words
The Economic Complexity of the Western Roman Empire
Michele Coscia explains how he and co-authors inferred the economic complexity of the Western Roman Empire from occupations recorded in Latin inscriptions (the LIST dataset), correcting for status and gender biases. Latium scored highest, and Roman-era complexity for modern-country territories correlates significantly with present-day Economic Complexity Index values.
4 min · 935 words
Railroads, UPenn, and a Well-Loved UNIX Machine
A restoration log for an AT&T 3B2/300: from a 43MB hard-drive backup the author reconstructs the machine's history, from short-line railroad operations to railroad expert-witness consulting, plus development material for UPenn's telephone class-registration system PARIS, with records spanning 1984 to 2002.
5 min · 1,116 words
What Happened to the Desktop Metaphor?
An essay on how personal computers once explained themselves through desktops, files, folders, windows and trash cans, and how modern interfaces trade that legible structure for convenience, leaving users less able to understand their own systems when things go wrong.
9 min · 2,094 words
An Unmade Film Shaped Hayao Miyazaki
Animation Obsessive traces how Hayao Miyazaki's unrealized 1980 adaptation of Richard Corben's Rowlf pulled him out of a creative slump and fed directly into Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, plus animation newsbits.
12 min · 2,656 words
Bark: The Toll-Free BBS for 90s Teens
Topics: Retrocomputing The other day I was thinking about the first communities I found online and, perhaps tangentially, to what degree they influenced the amount of therapy I now require to function normally as an adult. Our family's second computer came from Sam's Club. It was a 386DX with Windows 3.0 but my inner nerd would have nothing to do with cheerful bit-mapped color schemes, preferring instead to exit to MS-DOS and do all necessary computing and gaming from a command prompt and text-based GUIs. Hardware-wise, it looked and felt cheap. The machine was less reliable than the…
19 min · 4,358 words
Nvidia's first GPU: GeForce 256
Dave Farquhar looks back at the GeForce 256, released October 11, 1999 as the first product Nvidia called a GPU: what arguably made it a GPU (hardware transform and lighting), how it compared to 3dfx and earlier coprocessors, how Sega's investment kept Nvidia alive, and how Nvidia later bought 3dfx's IP.
3 min · 627 words
The 1st Time Machines Mogged Mathematicians
Pessimists Archive's Louis Anslow revisits the 1976 computer-assisted proof of the Four Color Theorem by Appel and Haken, the skepticism and outright rejection it drew from mathematicians, how acceptance slowly came, and the parallels with today's debate over AI-generated mathematics.
4 min · 979 words
Christopher Drum of Stone Tools takes a hands-on look at Lotus Improv on NeXTSTEP, the cult-classic spreadsheet that separated data, formulas and views into named categories, testing how its model holds up today, what it got right, and where its rigidity frustrates traditional spreadsheet use.
33 min · 7,630 words
Hittite royal archive found in Turkey
The History Blog reports a large Hittite-period cuneiform archive excavated in Turkey, describing the tablets’ find context, what kinds of administrative and royal records they appear to contain, and why the discovery matters for Anatolian Bronze Age history.
2 min · 549 words
Classic 1990's PC Shooter Quake Runs on Pimoroni Explorer
Pimoroni's Les Pounder covers Zenodante's RP2350 Quake, a port of Quake's single-player campaign that runs on the £33.90 Pimoroni Explorer microcontroller board, a game that once needed a £1,000 1990s PC.
2 min · 434 words
Kevin Kelly's 2016 AI Predictions, 10 Years Later
Taylor Troesh revisits AI-related excerpts from Kevin Kelly's 2016 book The Inevitable a decade on, noting that Kelly anticipated a few AI heavyweights dominating while also arguing for a future of open, ubiquitous, commodity intelligence.
5 min · 1,089 words
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
Mark Dastmalchi-Round walks through tools, techniques and challenges of writing a retro ZX Spectrum demoscene crack intro, covering the pipeline from assets to a runnable production.
31 min · 7,074 words
The Toftwood Male Voice Choir: A Mystery Pressed in Vinyl
Amateur radio operator EI3LH turns an impulse-buy vinyl LP by the Toftwood Male Voice Choir into a detective story: tracing the obscure Christian choral record, its pressing, and the people behind a mystery crate-dig find.
9 min · 2,136 words
Delta’s Biscoff Cookies Were Supposed to Be Temporary. Then Passengers Fell in Love.
Serious Eats traces how Lotus Bakeries' Biscoff, a Belgian speculoos cookie long eaten with coffee, became an American air-travel fixture after a 1980s peanut shortage pushed Delta to serve it as a temporary peanut substitute in 1986, why it works so well at altitude, and how it grew into a grocery staple and global brand.
7 min · 1,666 words
$50K First Letters Prize awarded for PHerc 343
The Vesuvius Challenge awards a $50K First Letters Prize to Erwin Nieuwlaar for virtually unwrapping and detecting ink in PHerc. 343, revealing the first text read from this still-rolled Herculaneum scroll since AD 79. Papyrologists read a Greek sequence likely meaning 'everything that happens' and discuss possible references to music.
4 min · 975 words
The Rise and Fall of the Plasma Screen
Brian Potter traces plasma displays from the University of Illinois PLATO terminals of the 1960s through their run as the premier flat-panel TV technology to their displacement by LCDs, and what the story says about how technologies win and lose.
8 min · 1,823 words
Why did Warriors Suppress Love?
Alice Evans asks whether patriarchy was inevitable, drawing on ethnographies from New Guinea, Amazonia and elsewhere to argue that cooperation beyond kin was often fraternal: warrior societies used initiation rituals, men's houses, secret societies and misogyny to keep men loyal to each other rather than to their wives.
13 min · 3,029 words
Jesse Waites describes using AI to search millions of digitized historical records, inspired by Benjamin Breen's dodo find, and how the process surfaced a forgotten meteorite report, three lost rhinos and volcanic eruptions missing from the Smithsonian's Global Volcanism Program list, with sources cited.
16 min · 3,659 words