The Bernoulli disk was a wild piece of 1980s hardware. Take a big floppy. Spin the platter at 1500 RPM just a micron or so from a read head. The …read more

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Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit …read more

Unless you’ve managed to avoid touching a Windows computer until after the Windows XP era, it’s pretty good odds you’ve played Space Cadet Pinball. Some of you may have even …read more

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Andrew Warkentin has spent over twenty years collecting old operating systems and getting them to run. The result is the Virtual OS Museum, a launcher and Linux VM that boots 570-odd operating systems on top of QEMU, VirtualBox, or UTM, with everything pre-installed, pre-configured, and rolled back to a known-good state by a snapshot tool when an install breaks. — Read the rest

The post A…

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Before the modern trifecta of video game giants came to dominate the market around two decades ago, the world was awash in video game consoles. Many of these retro platforms …read more

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Everytime I want to make pixel art look old-timey, I find myself searching for and fussing with online filter sites that don't look right, or trying to do something clever with scanlines or shadowmask textures in Photoshop, which also never looks quite right. — Read the rest

The post Simple app to make images look like they're on an old CRT display appeared first on Boing Boing.

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You may not know what a ADM-3, a TV910, or a H1420 are, but you probably have at least heard of a VT-100. They are all terminals from around the …read more

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My first experience of emulation was ZSNES in the late 1990s, letting me return to what then seemed like ancient history: the _early_ 1990s. I could finally finish _Secret of Mana!_ And I did. It was magical to learn that the new thing could pretend to be the old thing, even if it didn't run so well on my Pentium 133. — Read the rest

The post Legendary emulator ZSNES rewritten from scratch…

Type "open mailbox" in The Visible Zorker, and the game does what it always did: tells you the mailbox is open, with a leaflet inside. But on the same page, you also see the function that just ran, what variables it touched, and where every object in the room currently sits. — Read the rest

The post Play Zork while reading the 1980 code that makes it work appeared first on Boing Boing.

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In the Shadow of the CPC is a book about the Amstrad CPC, an 8-bit personal computer released in 1984 and popular in the U.K., France, Spain and Germany, selling about 3 million units through the decade. Though not so well-known as the Commodore 64 and Sinclair ZX Spectrum, it has a dedicated following, and a massive software library. — Read the rest

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The Macintosh's operating system has been ported to the Nintendo Wii, defying those who said it could not be done. Granted, it's the original release of Mac OS X, itself older than the 2006 console, but the hardware constraints (Only 88MB of RAM!) — Read the rest

The post Mac OS X ported to the Nintendo Wii appeared first on Boing Boing.

Over the history of this business, a lot of people have foreseen limits that look rather silly in hindsight– in 1943, IBM President Thomas Watson declared that “I think there …read more

Apple’s Intel era was a boon for many, especially for software developers who were able to bring their software to the platform much more easily than in the PowerPC era. …read more

Although generative language models have found little widespread, profitable adoption outside of putting artists out of work and giving tech companies an easy scapegoat for cutting staff, their their underlying …read more

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If you weren’t around for the early PC era, or were a little more casual about operating systems, you could perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that DOS is not …read more

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