HTTP 418 · Oddities
An illustrated primer explains why Amiga users still defend screens: independent display areas could vary in resolution, colour depth and palette, overlap, scroll and slide across one another. The article covers OCS-era …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A Mac Mini M6 running a modified 86Box 6.0 build holds a Windows 98 SE machine at 600 MHz Pentium II speed. A base M4 reaches 500 MHz. The test includes emulated Voodoo 3 graphics, Winamp audio, Cinebench 2000 and 3DMark…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Tim inherited a Visual Basic application from before 2000, written before VB .Net, that adds one leading zero to years below 1000. For Caesar Augustus's death in 14 AD, the output becomes "014". The four-digit form would…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Matt Birchler found that a chilled La Croix can keep an iPhone 18 Pro out of iOS’s serious thermal state during a 20-run transcription benchmark. The phone sustained 400.4 words per second on the final run, while the tes…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Yeo Kheng Meng has built an xHCI host driver that lets Windows 98 talk to modern USB controllers, including the hardware in a 2020 ThinkPad. The LLM-assisted project is available as xhci98 on GitHub and still has bugs. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Metaphors make unfamiliar ideas accessible, but they also hide what they leave out. Evan Meagher uses the familiar claim that consciousness is computation to question how much we understand about the brain. He traces ear…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Ed Nather’s 1983 USENET account about programmer Mel follows the construction of a blackjack demo for Royal McBee’s drum computers. Mel hand-coded hexadecimal, placed instructions by rotational timing, and exploited arit…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A programmer recalls an entry-level job in 1999 built around Pick, a system that later cost him about $1,000 to leave behind. Pick began as GIRLS for IBM System/360 in 1965 and reached commercial release in 1973. Its dat…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
KAIST's RAIBO2 quadruped covered 42.195 km at South Korea's Sangju Dried Persimmon Marathon in 4:19:52 on one battery charge. A Nature paper published nearly two years later credits lightweight construction, efficient mo…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Discord has started deploying age estimation after shelving the rollout for more than six months amid user backlash. The model studies account behavior and social connections, while message and call content stay outside …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Dave Plummer has connected his upgraded PDP-11/83 to pdp1173.com, where visitors can watch 2.11BSD processes refresh every five seconds. The site accepts no commands and shields the machine with a cache. Its four megabyt…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An early-2000s trading-systems project treated documentation and schedule control as the product. A developer at a stock-market surveillance startup built a needed reporting module over one weekend and revealed it on Mon…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An Atari 2600 project has squeezed a demake of the 1990s PC adventure Myst onto original hardware. The console offers only 128 bytes of RAM, so Vince built a specialized cartridge from a BurgerTime donor and used E7 bank…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
James Gosling's account settles the origin story behind Java's 0xCAFEBABE marker. The value grew out of
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An animation script contains a C++ call with a parameter named `length4_3_3`. Remy Porter treats the identifier as a disguised range expression, probably equivalent to `length4[3]`, and connects its shape to John Cage’s …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Sheila Dixon is recreating a period terminal for the RC2014 retrocomputer with an Alphacom thermal printer, a keyboard and a ROM-based driver. The printer connects to the Z80 bus, while an 8255 I/O card scans the keys. I…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1996, Bill Venners asked comp.lang.java why every Java class file begins with 0xCAFEBABE. Patrick Naughton later supplied the answer: the team had selected a distinctive, memorable value before the language was called…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A YouTube video asks how computers acquired their familiar forms. The available listing provides no speaker, runtime, or technical outline, so the premise is the full report here. Its subject is an old design lesson: com…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
TruStage’s July 10, 2026 cybersecurity incident left major functions unavailable for months and put insurance policies at risk of lapsing when customers could not make payments. The disruption spread through partners suc…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An Android display in a Mövenpick hotel elevator in Amsterdam stopped running last week, during rain and a 24-hour public transport strike. The screen identified the failing software as LOTA and offered a “Close app” con…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
An unofficial community project is bringing Commodore’s Amix, the System V Release 4 variant shipped for the A2500UX and A3000UX in 1990 to 1992, to 68040 and 68060 Amigas and modern accelerators. Amigaux.org combines a …
HTTP 418 · Oddities
ZXdesk, an assembly-language project by mindbox77, gives the 48K Sinclair ZX Spectrum a GEM-like desktop with menus, windows, and built-in applications. The machine has no disk drive, so it cannot load independent progra…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
A vintage computer T-shirt is more than a piece of nostalgia; it can be a warning about business execution. Bryan Cantrill uses an Oxide shirt to revisit Sun’s failure. Although Sun made Solaris open source and attracted…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Sony’s SMC-70 entered the 1982 desktop market with a 4 MHz Z80, CP/M and an unusual expansion system. Modules were stacked and fixed with metal rods, while 16-color graphics, sound and optional video hardware gave the ma…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
In 1999, Poul-Henning Kamp used a FreeBSD dispute over fractional arguments for sleep(1) to explain why small technical choices attract disproportionate debate. His email turned “bikeshed” into FOSS vocabulary. Kamp late…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
On September 17, 2026, Remy Porter’s CodeSOD column showed a GPL header from Oracle code with “2013” repeated across a massive block. The page notes that its line breaks were added to reveal the full extent. A featured c…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
George Coulouris records how QMC became the UK's first UNIX site and how his 1975 editor em reached Berkeley in 1976. Bill Joy used the code as a starting point for ex and vi. The account also traces UNIX V4's 1973 arriv…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
nand2mario has built zSST, a SystemVerilog recreation of 3dfx's Voodoo Graphics, and paired it with the z486 CPU in a DOS PC for the Xilinx KV260. The design runs at 100 MHz, boots Tomb Raider's original 3dfx renderer, a…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Nusano has joined the US Department of Energy's Nuclear Energy Launch Pad Program with a proposed metal-based process for producing HALEU fuel. The Utah company says one unit could make 5.9 metric tons annually from 2031…
HTTP 418 · Oddities
Usenet-Rewind makes more than one billion messages from 1981 onward searchable through a modern web interface. Ernie Smith finds posts about music charts, online spam and forgotten celebrity chats, while also confronting…