My new hero: DadHacker. Fun stories from 80s game programming.

Louis Rossetto, Wired co-founder, responds to a brilliant article about the history of the magazine. Reading Wired in the early 90s was like reading about the future, it was inspiring–in both its written form and how it looked (it was beautiful).

Here’s an interesting, detailed history of Pixar, including some of the prehistory. An interesting Saturday read.

A human interface design story about the Zire 71 camera (pdf).

A thorough look at the making of the Colossal Cave Adventure, including pictures of the caves that inspired the game, the game’s history, and some of its source code and design.

The Palm OS uses Mac-style tap-and-drag selection and persistent scroll bars, but (a) a stylus is far more precise than a fingertip, so their scroll bars are thinner, not thicker; and (b) no one has raved about how cool the Palm OS is since the ’90s. –John Gruber of Daring Fireball

(it’s funny because it’s true)

A bit of history on the DOS path character.

[stars: 3] Wild Fire (Nelson DeMille). A alternate history of the years following the 9/11 attacks, in the conspiracy-theorist’s vein. It’s not the type of novel I normally read, but was well worth the time: it reminded me that behind-the scenes is always more complicated than it seems (and in different ways than you’d expect). A quick, funny, and entertaining read.

A negative, longish history of Microsoft’s PocketPC operating systems. While the number of marketing labels applied to WinCE is disturbing, we’ve actually found it to be a reasonable platform.

Antic magazine’s graphics software history page. Antic was a great magazine and the Atari ST was a fun platform.