In 1986 the personal computer market was not settled, not polite, and certainly not predictable. It…
Category: Retro computing news
The 3½-inch floppy disk drive: Sony’s most influential hardware release
In 1982, at a moment when personal computing was still finding its physical identity, Sony introduced…
The truth behind CRT radiation and the products that promised protection
For a long stretch of the late 20th century, the humble computer monitor was quietly suspected…
Intel’s MMX technology: why some 90s games required it—and why it failed
In the mid-1990s, the personal computer was changing faster than its hardware architecture could comfortably support.…
Was the Y2K bug overhyped? The real story behind the Millennium bug
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the world found itself gripped by a peculiar…
The woman behind JPEG: Belgian mathematician Ingrid Daubechies
Every time a photo loads instantly on a phone, slips into an email attachment, or travels…
Firefox OS: the idealist that challenged Apple and Google
The story of Firefox OS does not begin with smartphones—it begins with a belief. A belief…
RISC OS and the Acorn Archimedes: inside the birth of ARM computing
When RISC OS debuted on the Acorn Archimedes in 1987, it represented not merely a new…
What old PC hardware taught us about control, complexity, and ownership
Before the computer ever made a sound, before a game loaded or a joystick twitched to…
How Cyrix survived Intel’s lawsuits—and changed the CPU market anyway
In the long shadow of Intel’s dominance, Cyrix occupies a strange and revealing place in PC…
When Chrome passed Internet Explorer: the moment the browser wars changed forever
For much of the early internet era, one web browser ruled above all others: Internet Explorer.…
NVIDIA’s first GPU: how the GeForce 256 changed graphics forever
In late 1999, the personal computer graphics industry reached a major turning point with the release…
From dust to boot: the only known Unix V4 archive revived
A long-lost magnetic tape from 1973, discovered in a University of Utah storage room, has provided…