Joe's blog.
A while ago, I rescued a 2011 11-inch MacBook Air (MacBookAir4,1). Someone mentioned having success installing FreeBSD on this model of laptop, so I had to try it for myself. To my surprise, with some…
Earlier this year, I read Martin Uecker's proposal N3212 to add parametric polymorphism to C. It's easy to scoff at the idea of adding generic programming to plain C, when C++ already has templates, a…
The FM TOWNS was the first computer to come with a CD-ROM drive, and it well predates attempts to standardize bootable CD-ROM behavior on the IBM PC and other platforms. The FM TOWNS' boot process for…
The FM TOWNS keyboard doesn't have a PrintScreen key, so how do you get Windows to take a screenshot when Alt+PrintScreen isn't available? After failing to find an answer on the Internet, I randomly p…
I got a KryoFlux so that I could image the original disks from some FM TOWNS software packages I recently got a hold of. The FM TOWNS, along with the NEC PC98 and Sharp X68000, all use a different phy…
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
The previous owner of my FM TOWNS UX20 thoughtfully removed the CMOS battery from the computer to keep it from exploding and damaging the electronics inside, but unfortunately, TOWNS OS uses the CMOS …
--> Back in 2017, luxury fashion house Chanel did a "Data Center Collection" runway show featuring a bunch of their classic purse designs with integrated LED displays. I don't think these pieces…
One of the things I like about retrocomputing is the way the limitations of older computers give a "grain" to the software that runs on them, like how film grain affects the quality of the image in a …
One interesting language design thread we've stumbled upon with Swift, but haven't fully developed, is the use of coroutines as an alternative to higher-order functions for building "control flow like…