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Arm & SoftBank: Part 1 — Masa comes calling, bearing gifts
Today, something a little different: a joint post in the form of a conversation between Jon Metzler and Babbage.
11 min · 2,555 words
VGHF Digital Archive passes 5000 magazines. Here's what's next.
The Video Game History Foundation marks 5000 magazines in its free research archive and outlines the next phase of digitization, access, and preservation priorities.
5 min · 1,239 words
AI labs need to start funding historical research
Res Obscura argues frontier labs should fund historical scholarship, using alchemical correspondence and early modern sources as a case for AI-assisted discovery.
14 min · 3,217 words
Why Buran Had Four Computers, Not Three — and What a Lean Proof Adds
**Date:** September 24, 2026 · **Author:** Dmitrii Zatona - Buran’s flight computer was four identical Biser-4 machines running the same programs synchronously. A comparison scheme blocked a failed one, and the design had to survive any two failures (Section 1). - Four is what two failures cost if a failed channel is found by comparing outputs alone. It is not the 3f + 1 of Byzantine agreement, which is a different problem (Sections 2 and 3).
33 min · 7,503 words
The science of Monkey Island: can grog actually dissolve a metal mug that fast?
Journal of Geek Studies tests the Monkey Island gag: whether acidic grog could dissolve a metal mug, with chemistry, history, and experiment notes.
16 min · 3,665 words
The MVUEH Break: GPT-6 Astra and a WWII Enigma message unsolved since 2005
Crypto Cellar Research documents how OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra helped break the long-unsolved MVUEH Kriegsmarine Enigma message—methods, cribs, and what the recovered plaintext reveals.
4 min · 831 words
A brief history of Windows scroll bar shortcuts
Raymond Chen recounts Win32 scroll-bar basics, the Windows 7 right-click “Scroll Here” menu, and the little-known Shift+click jump—then notes how Electron/Chromium scrollbars mostly lost the context menu.
2 min · 462 words
What Happened to the Snowden Archive
The last document from the Snowden archive was published on 29 May 2019. The Guardian stopped publishing documents in February 2014, Der Spiegel in January 2015, and The New York Times and ProPublica in August 2015. After that, only The Intercept was still publishing documents, with only a few exceptions, until it closed its archive in March 2019. Eleven weeks later, on 29 May 2019, it released what would become the final batch of documents from the archive. Since then, no news outlet, journalist, or institution anywhere has published a single document from the Snowden archive.…
55 min · 12,744 words
Arrow heads at Obi-Rakhmat (Uzbekistan) 80 ka ago?
A PLOS ONE study examines stone points from Obi-Rakhmat Cave and asks whether they indicate early projectile / arrow technology around 80,000 years ago in Central Asia.
66 min · 15,269 words
Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side
Marcin Wichary traces Mac keyboard symbols that vanished from modern UIs—command, option, and other glyphs—and what their disappearance says about interface history.
3 min · 766 words
A new world airport and its baggage
A longform history of Denver International Airport’s automated baggage system: ambition, failure, and what the wreckage still teaches about complex infrastructure.
32 min · 7,322 words
Daniel Lawrence Lu visits San Francisco’s Muni Heritage Weekend—historic streetcars, museum cars, and notes on transit nostalgia and the city’s working rail heritage.
1 min · 329 words
Bryan Cantrill reflects on Sun Microsystems’ culture and mistakes—what Oxide’s homage tees revive, and which lessons still matter for hardware-software companies.
3 min · 718 words
An unofficial community project revives Amiga Unix (Amix) for 68040/68060 machines and modern accelerators, with a modern toolchain, package manager, and open grimoire of the work.
3 min · 626 words
Glashütte Trash Clock – A 30-minute pendulum clock made from trash
Niklas Roy builds a fully mechanical 30-minute pendulum clock from scavenged junk in Glashütte, Saxony—documenting escapement design, found materials, and the craft of making timepieces from trash.
12 min · 2,722 words
Celebrating 70 years of Fortran
Joe Wallwork marks seventy years since Fortran's 1957 debut: why the language still thrives in scientific computing, what the Fortran-lang community is building, and how modern Fortran fits high-performance and climate work.
2 min · 374 words
The mystery animal on an ancient god’s head
Signore Galilei investigates the strange animal depicted atop an ancient deity’s head—tracing iconography, competing identifications, and what the motif may have meant to its makers.
4 min · 977 words
Ray Ozzie and the Optimism of Being Early
Matthew Guay profiles Ray Ozzie's path from ARPA-funded high-school teletypes through Lotus Notes and beyond—an essay on the optimism of building early when the tools and networks are still unfinished.
10 min · 2,332 words
Introducing mapsnap: Automated Georeferencing for Historic Sanborn Insurance Maps
Dan Vanderkam introduces mapsnap, a program that automatically georeferences historic Sanborn fire insurance maps from the Library of Congress. He explains why these block-by-block maps are valuable, how mapsnap matches them to modern street data, where it fails, and his goal of georeferencing at least 90 percent of the collection, browsable at mapsnap.org.
9 min · 1,990 words
ECHO presents Suzanne Ciani’s 1976 Buchla Cookbook as an open digital edition — original patches, diagrams, and a conversation with Ciani on documenting the Buchla 200 for composers and practitioners.
30 min · 6,971 words