Computing history

Old machines, old formats, and how much of it still runs.

7 articles.

Tue Aug 04 2026

A C compiler in LISP, a LISP in C, and the subject that changed my life

In 1986 I took Compiler Techniques under Bruce Ellis and wrote a C compiler in LISP. I have got it running again, on hardware that did not exist when I wrote it.

Tue Aug 04 2026

Sat Aug 01 2026

Can you still read the files you made thirty years ago?

What it took to recover my own conference papers from Word 2.0 and PowerPoint 4.0, and what it taught me about who is actually keeping my archive readable.

Sat Aug 01 2026

Sun Jul 05 2026

Rogoweb: Rogue and Rog-O-Matic, alive in the browser

The 1980 game Rogue and the expert system built to play it, both compiled to WebAssembly and running side by side in a browser tab. The original C, not a rewrite.

Sun Jul 05 2026

Sat Jul 04 2026

Colossal Cave Adventure, rebuilt over breakfast

Colossal Cave Adventure ported to strictly typed TypeScript over a few breakfasts, and checked against the original's own ninety-five test transcripts. Then a second model laid out the cave map the first one could not.

Sat Jul 04 2026

Wed Jun 10 2020

A celebration of 50 Years of Unix

A beautiful operating system, still healthy after 50 years.

Wed Jun 10 2020

Tue Sep 01 1992

Reverse engineering Infocom games - the first open source Z-Machine interpreter

In 1987 five of us at Sydney University took Infocom's virtual machine apart to see how it worked. We did not expect it to matter to anyone else.

Tue Sep 01 1992

Thu May 21 1987

A 6809 board that recorded MIDI and spoke SDLC

Five of us built one microprocessor board in 1987 and submitted it for two courses at once. It bridged a synthesiser and a VAX, and it was meant to be where Rubato came out.

Thu May 21 1987

Subjects across the computing history, sized by the number of articles each one appears in. Each one leads to every article on that subject, in whatever category it was filed under.