Retro Computing blogs

Andy Hertzfeld and collaborators tell first-person stories from the development of the original Apple Macintosh in the early 1980s.

Top post: -2000 Lines of Code

Ken Shirriff, an engineer with a Berkeley PhD, reverse-engineers vintage chips and computers and tears down chargers and other hardware.

Top post: Mining Bitcoin with pencil and paper: 0.67 hashes per day

Fabien Sanglard writes detailed code reviews of classic game engines such as Doom and Quake, and has published books on them.

Top post: The Game Engine Black Book: Doom

James Hague, a programmer with a retro-games background, writes about Erlang, functional programming, software simplicity, and the history of computing.

Top post: Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than

Linus Åkesson writes about programming, Unix internals, music and retro hardware, including The TTY Demystified and Kernighan's Lever.

Top post: The TTY demystified (2008)

Jimmy Maher writes long histories of computing and video games, covering the IBM PC, Windows, SimCity and text adventures.

Top post: Sitemap

Peter Ehlert's pagetable.com covers 8-bit computing history, with Commodore 64 ROM disassemblies, 6502 details and vintage source code.

Top post: C64 basic and kernal ROM disassembly

Jason Scott is a digital archivist who writes about preserving old software, BBS files, floppies, and web history through textfiles.com.

Top post: Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late

Hundred Rabbits is a small collective living on a sailboat, building low-power software like Uxn and Orca and writing about off-grid work.

Top post: Uxn

Stanislav Datskovskiy writes about computing, simplicity, hardware design, and why modern software and tools fall short.

Top post: Why Man is not a Particularly Good Source of Entropy

The OS/2 Museum covers the history of OS/2, DOS, Windows, and early PC hardware and software quirks.

Top post: Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

Dmitry Grinberg is an embedded engineer who documents hardware hacks, such as running Linux on an 8-bit microcontroller and Palm OS on other devices.

Top post: Linux on an 8-bit micro

Technologizer is a technology history and commentary site that covers the origins of Windows, magazines, Polaroid, early video games and software.

Top post: The Origin of Windows, by the product manager who shipped Windows 1.0 (2010)

Norbert Landsteiner runs a personal site of retro computing projects, including emulations of the PDP-1, ELIZA, a 6502 reference and old terminal typography.

Top post: Virtual Punch Card Creator

Wouter van Oortmerssen, a programming language designer, hosts his projects such as Lobster, Amiga E, FALSE and the TreeSheets data organizer.

Top post: Treesheets: cross-platform, free-form data organizer app

Tavis Ormandy, a Google Project Zero security researcher, writes about vulnerabilities, password managers and getting old software like Lotus 1-2-3 running on Linux.

Top post: Password Managers

VileR runs a site on DOS-era PC graphics and typography, including a large collection of old PC fonts and CGA research.

Top post: A collection of text mode fonts, system fonts and BIOS fonts from DOS-era PCs

512 Pixels is Stephen Hackett's blog on Apple history, Mac design, macOS wallpapers and Apple news.

Top post: Every default macOS wallpaper

Steve Chamberlin builds retro hardware projects such as homebrew CPUs, Floppy Emu and 68000 Linux on a breadboard.

Top post: Explaining 4K 60Hz Video Through USB-C Hub

Devine Lu Linvega's personal wiki covers Uxn, esoteric languages, permacomputing, and small self-made tools.

Top post: Uxn is a 8-bit virtual stack machine

Andre Weissflog, a game and tools programmer, writes about C, WebAssembly, emulators, and handle-based memory design.

Top post: Handles are the better pointers

Rodrigo Copetti writes detailed architecture breakdowns of video game consoles, covering CPUs, graphics hardware, and how games ran on them.

Top post: Architecture of the Playstation

Datagubbe, a Swedish writer, covers the Amiga, retro computing, pixel art, the demo scene, and the decline of software usability.

Top post: Is software abstraction killing civilization? (2021)

Andy Gavin, co-creator of Crash Bandicoot at Naughty Dog, writes about how the game was made, including its Lisp-based GOOL language.

Top post: Making Crash Bandicoot

Tom Murphy VII, who posts as Tom 7, publishes offbeat research projects such as NES-playing programs, printable DOS executables, and odd hardware and floating-point experiments.

Top post: Harder Drive: hard drives we didn't want, or need (2022) [video]

Virtually Fun covers old operating systems, emulation, and software archaeology, such as Windows/386, OS/2, Alpha NT, and early Unix and BSD.

Top post: Unauthorized Windows/386

David Given writes about programming languages like Go and Ada, retro computing projects such as Cowgol and FluxEngine, and the WordGrinder terminal word processor.

Top post: WordGrinder: Lightweight word processor that runs in a terminal

Evil Mad Scientist, a small electronics kit maker, posts about its hardware projects, such as the MOnSter 6502, plotters, and circuit kits.

Top post: Microwave Oven Diagnostics with Indian Snack Food

Kragen Javier Sitaker writes personal essays and experiments on programming languages, compilers, bootstrapping, memory models and small computing projects.

Top post: The Memory Models That Underlie Programming Languages

Bryan Lunduke's Substack covers computing history, Linux, open source politics, and retro operating systems.

Top post: The computers used to do 3D animation for Final Fantasy VII in 1996

Bryan Lunduke writes news and commentary on open source, Linux, Mozilla, and tech industry politics, with a retro computing streak.

Top post: Firefox Money: Investigating the Finances of Mozilla

PoC||GTFO is a free journal of hacking and security research, published as PDF issues that are often also valid ZIP or other file formats.

Top post: International Journal of Proof-of-Concept or Get The Fuck Out

Jordan Mechner, creator of Prince of Persia and Karateka, shares his game development journals, books, and graphic novels.

Top post: The Making of Prince of Persia (& Karateka)

Covers the history of CPUs and memory chips, including spacecraft processors, mainframe-on-a-chip designs, and obscure Soviet and Italian parts.

Top post: The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space

Coders Notes is a programmer's personal blog on game development, low-level code, compression, operating systems and computing history.

Top post: A Constructive Look at TempleOS

Paul Bourke's personal site collects pages on fractals, attractors, PostScript, planetarium dome projection, geometry, and graphics.

Top post: Fractals

byuu is the developer behind the bsnes and higan SNES emulators, writing about emulation accuracy and game preservation.

Top post: Fast coroutines in C from BSNES

Damien Guard, a software developer and type designer, writes about fonts, retro computer typography, and C#.

Top post: Envy Code R

Adrian Kennard (RevK) is CEO of UK ISP Andrews & Arnold and writes about networking, embedded hardware, and odd technical history.

Top post: ADSL works over wet string (2017)

Patrick Gillespie writes about his small web projects, such as the ASCII art generator TAAG and a keyboard layout analyzer, plus puzzles and code.

Top post: Show HN: Text to ASCII Art Generator (TAAG)

Andrew Plotkin (Zarf) writes about interactive fiction, Infocom history, rule-based programming and tools such as the Quixe interpreter.

Top post: The Obsessively Complete Infocom Catalog

Gough Lui, a hobbyist tester, writes about gadget reviews, batteries, power banks, flash storage, modems, and old PCs.

Top post: Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)

Raymii is a sysadmin who writes about Linux, nginx security, VPNs, hardware keys, keyboards, OpenVMS, and retro tech.

Top post: Strong SSL Security on Nginx – Raymii.org

Jim Leonard (Trixter), a demoscene programmer, writes about IBM PC and 8088 hardware, demos, and retro computing history.

Top post: 8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators

Tom Moertel writes about programming techniques, including functional programming, recursion-to-iteration, type-based design, Git tricks, and old game hacks.

Top post: A Great Old-Timey Game-Programming Hack

Ratfactor is a programmer's personal site with essays and notes on Forth, minimalist computing, text-based tools, and Unix commands.

Top post: Forth: The programming language that writes itself

Dan Farquhar writes about the history of personal computers, vintage hardware, and the companies behind them.

Top post: Cashing in on GIF by Charging Royalties

A programmer and veteran of the early game and computer industry writes humorous essays on software, with a post on the Atari ST and Unix.

Top post: Donkey Kong and Me

Chris Evans, a Chrome security engineer at Google, writes about vulnerabilities, exploits, and reverse engineering of old floppy disks and computers.

Top post: Compromising a Linux desktop using 6502 opcodes on the NES

Marcin Wichary, a designer and writer, publishes long, richly illustrated pieces on keyboards, typography, Mac history, and interface design.

Top post: Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004

EmbeddedRelated hosts articles by embedded engineers on algorithms, FPGAs, C techniques, hardware bugs, and the history of the 6502.

Top post: Chebyshev Approximation

Floodgap is the personal site of Cameron Kaiser, covering retro computing, PowerPC Mac browser forks, Gopher, and the TTYtter Twitter client.

Top post: Firefox Fork for PowerPC Macs

Chris Crawford, a veteran game designer, writes about interactive storytelling, game design essays, and the source code of his old games.

Top post: Seventy

Don Hopkins, a veteran programmer who worked on The Sims, SimCity and NeWS, posts design documents, code and essays.

Top post: History of Pizzatool

Gekk writes personal essays and technical write-ups on Windows, DOS, networking oddities, and living with ADHD.

Top post: ADHD, a Lifelong Struggle (2018)

Tablizer is a programmer who wrote on Geocities about table-oriented programming, OOP criticism, and whether computer science is science.

Top post: Object Oriented Programming Myths Debunked

Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, writes about spreadsheet history, software longevity, and his own software and essays.

Top post: VisiCalc Executable for the IBM PC (1999)

Chris Fenton builds unusual computers as personal projects, including a homebrew Cray-1A, a 16-core Z80 laptop and a 3D printed computer.

Top post: Homebrew Cray-1A

Benj Edwards writes about vintage computers and gaming history, including hardware quirks, reverse engineering, and interviews with early industry figures.

Top post: Why the Apple II Didn’t Support Lowercase Letters

Scott Schiller is a front-end developer who builds JavaScript projects like SoundManager 2, a snow effect, and HTML5 remakes of retro games.

Top post: SoundManager 2 is Audio for Javascript