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Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible
Jake Voytko grants that AI-accelerated code output is making software buggier, but pushes back on nostalgia: drawing on using computers since 1990, he recalls blue screens, lost work before autosave, no security, disk fragmentation, tiny memory, unreliable install media and the turbo button to argue that software in the Windows era was far worse.
11 min · 2,593 words
The Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting
Murat Demirbas reflects on Ananyo Bhattacharya's biography of John von Neumann, tracing von Neumann's habit of abstraction across mathematics, computing and game theory, and his late view that nuclear-age safety rests on day-to-day judgment rather than formal models.
15 min · 3,390 words
Rosettes and Other Hidden Traces of Hamburg's Tram
Almost 50 years after Hamburg's last tram ran in 1978, Mert Bulan goes looking for what the once-huge network left behind, from rosettes on house walls that held overhead wires to rails under the asphalt, and asks why Germany's second-largest city ended up without trams.
9 min · 1,989 words
Alfie John recalls growing up before the mainstream internet, trading pirated games on floppies, discovering BBSes and the demoscene's cracktros, and finding Denthor of ASPHYXIA's VGA demo trainer tutorials in Turbo Pascal, which made him decide he wanted to make demos and become a programmer.
4 min · 1,017 words
The Hibernate Origin Story (Outsider Edition)
Charles Miller recounts, as a bystander in the room, how the Hibernate Java persistence library grew out of work at Sydney company Cirrus Technologies around 2001, why its root package was cirrus.inf, and how it came to be released under the LGPL.
5 min · 1,066 words
An essay on mathematicians' emotional reactions to AI-generated proofs, from Terence Tao's call for etiquette and Hugo Duminil-Copin's account of panic to spiritual angst and humility, set against the 1976 four color theorem and other industrializing disciplines, arguing the romantic era of mathematics is ending.
8 min · 1,738 words
The unknown painter behind Manhattan’s Gilded Age interiors
Jane Coombs profiles James Wall Finn, the largely forgotten muralist whose ceilings adorn the New York Public Library's Rose Main Reading Room and other Gilded Age Manhattan rooms, and pieces together how he won elite commissions.
6 min · 1,287 words
Whatever Happened to Fire Escapes?
Practical Engineering traces the history of the external iron fire escape in American cities, why it became the default retrofit after early fire egress laws, the problems that made it unreliable, and how building codes shifted to protected interior stairwells and other egress designs, with the tradeoffs regulation creates.
10 min · 2,407 words
Clockwork Mechanics, Maintenance, and Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages
Karl Peeter Valk argues on the JHI Blog that the mechanical clock became a potent metaphor in the late Middle Ages not because of its perfection but because of its imperfections, tracing the image through Nicole Oresme, courtly culture, and Henry Suso's Horologium Sapientiae.
11 min · 2,527 words
William Gibson and the trademarking of Cyberspace™
A short essay on William Gibson’s coining of “cyberspace,” how the word entered culture, and the odd history of attempts to trademark it.
2 min · 526 words
The History of Development of Norton Commander
Dr Nikolai Bezroukov's Softpanorama chapter recounts how John Socha's Norton Commander defined the Orthodox File Manager paradigm—from VDOS and NC 1.0 in 1986 through the cult of NC 3.0 to NC 5.5—and why the dual-pane OFM design still shapes file managers decades later.
81 min · 18,563 words
A pricey induction cooktop left Charles C Mann asking what on earth Dekton is. The answer: a tough engineered surface invented by Cosentino in 2013 that is basically porcelain. He uses it to explore porcelain's resurgence, from wet-activated nonslip tiles to other advances in materials science that have made a once-precious material ordinary.
10 min · 2,351 words
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
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
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
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
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
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
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