Retrocomputing

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Awarded 661 times.
Why were those colors chosen to be the default palette for 256-color VGA?
Awarded Nov 9 at 15:17
What did it sound like when you played a cassette tape with programs on it?
Awarded Nov 8 at 23:10
What was the legal arrangement between author, publisher and end user for 'type-in programs' in old computer magazines?
Awarded Nov 7 at 18:42
Why have consumer-level graphing calculators seemingly not developed in 20+ years?
Awarded Nov 6 at 5:47
Slash versus backslash as directory separator – what/who caused this rift?
Awarded Nov 3 at 14:03
Who invented file extensions in file names?
Awarded Nov 2 at 14:09
Why does NT4 fail on boot if you give it an x64 CPU?
Awarded Nov 1 at 12:46
Which BASIC-like language has "ENDIF", "DIM ... OF" to declare arrays, and a double slash for comments?
Awarded Oct 15 at 11:34
What's the most recent version of AmigaOS?
Awarded Oct 7 at 20:27
Why did Visual Basic use parentheses for both function call and array access?
Awarded Oct 6 at 12:51
How did early computers deal with calculations involving pounds, shillings, and pence?
Awarded Oct 5 at 23:57
Why did the Motorola 68000 processor family fall out of use in personal computers in the 21st century?
Awarded Sep 26 at 12:48
Was leaving all xxxxxx11 opcodes unused on the 6502 a deliberate design choice?
Awarded Sep 21 at 8:34
Why does the Z80 include the RLD and RRD instructions?
Awarded Sep 13 at 19:26
Why did 1990s-2000s LCD all use 60 Hz refresh?
Awarded Aug 31 at 5:08
Why does the Commodore 64 have 4K of non-banked RAM at $C000?
Awarded Aug 23 at 18:11
"Quit all programs, and then restart your computer" in the Windows 95 "Illegal operation" dialog
Awarded Aug 12 at 8:57
Reconstruct the loop from "The Story of Mel"
Awarded Aug 10 at 17:15
Why didn’t the 1980s micros use MC68010?
Awarded Aug 7 at 19:51
In what ways was the Windows NT POSIX implementation unsuited to real use?
Awarded Jul 16 at 1:11
Do any FAT8 filesystem images survive?
Awarded Jun 25 at 15:09
How did ZX Spectrum games loaders prevent the use of MERGE?
Awarded Jun 24 at 4:34
Has there ever been a C compiler where using ++i was faster than i++?
Awarded Jun 10 at 9:03
Why was MacOS unix certified?
Awarded Jun 7 at 17:27
Why are the | and ¦ keys labelled the wrong way around?
Awarded Jun 2 at 6:21
Most modern C compilers targeting DOS 8086, running on DOS 8086 (16-bit)
Awarded May 31 at 12:05
MOS 8502, just a 6510B?
Awarded May 29 at 14:06
Where/when did the sentence "a good developer is lazy" first appear?
Awarded May 26 at 3:41
Why did DOS-based Windows require HIMEM.SYS to boot?
Awarded May 2 at 20:18
Why was desktop CPU frequency so low in the late 1990s?
Awarded Apr 26 at 10:36
Looking for a 90's sorcery game on Atari ST
Awarded Apr 18 at 22:40
Why didn't the 6502 have increment/decrement opcodes for A?
Awarded Apr 11 at 11:08
When did HTTP start compressing text?
Awarded Mar 30 at 13:17
What did Ctrl+NumLock do?
Awarded Mar 9 at 7:35
Did any DOS compatibility layers exist for any UNIX-like systems before DOS started to become outmoded?
Awarded Mar 5 at 0:40
Why are the Intel 8080's rotate instructions called opposite to intuition?
Awarded Mar 2 at 12:51
What software stack could I use to get X10 (the version of X before X11) up and running on a modern system?
Awarded Mar 1 at 5:19
Who ended up owning Commodore's semiconductor IP?
Awarded Feb 26 at 19:27
Managing registers/memory effectively on the Z80
Awarded Feb 18 at 22:08
What is 'Adaptive Tile Refresh' in the context of Commander Keen?
Awarded Feb 15 at 0:25
Was there a keyboard layout starting with "TBSY"?
Awarded Feb 14 at 0:10
Was there any technological reason that C was designed to return only a single thing from a function?
Awarded Feb 4 at 4:15
Why was it not possible to cost-reduce the Amiga 500?
Awarded Jan 27 at 17:55
Origin of "string"
Awarded Jan 26 at 15:10
Has there ever been a pressed optical disc containing a computer virus?
Awarded Jan 24 at 3:10
How much RAM could one put in a typical 80386 setup?
Awarded Jan 23 at 12:33
Separate code and data address spaces on the Z80
Awarded Jan 20 at 21:50
When was the term ‘directory’ replaced by ‘folder’?
Awarded Jan 18 at 15:42
Why is Ctrl-V the Paste shortcut?
Awarded Jan 15 at 0:15
Why did x86 support self-modifying code in the 80s and 90s?
Awarded Jan 14 at 20:11
What was the last non-monolithic CPU to come to market?
Awarded Jan 14 at 14:46
Did anyone ever run out of stack space on the 6502?
Awarded Jan 11 at 10:48
How could early UNIX OS comprise so few lines of code?
Awarded Jan 10 at 18:52
What was the most critical supporting software for COBOL on IBM mainframes?
Awarded Jan 8 at 11:56
Why does the FAT file system have separate ‘hidden’ and ‘system’ attributes?
Awarded Jan 5 at 4:33
How did Multics make library calls available as shell commands?
Awarded Jan 2 at 23:51
How did the X-Men game for Sega Genesis have its state survive a console reset?
Awarded Dec 30, 2022 at 14:06
Did Microsoft really reserve secret APIs in Windows?
Awarded Dec 25, 2022 at 9:37
Why was the "Space-cadet keyboard" called that?
Awarded Dec 22, 2022 at 1:35
How could the SNES take advantage of in-cartridge coprocessors that weren't invented when the SNES came out?
Awarded Dec 21, 2022 at 17:47
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