Raffzahn's user avatar
Raffzahn's user avatar
Raffzahn's user avatar
Raffzahn
  • Member for 5 years, 7 months
  • Last seen this week
  • München, Deutschland
203 votes
Accepted

Why is the keyboard and cellphone / telephone numbers in a different order?

151 votes

Why did some early CPUs use external math chips?

119 votes
Accepted

How did people use ed?

106 votes

Why did moving the mouse cursor cause Windows 95 to run more quickly?

103 votes

What is between the sectors of floppy disks?

102 votes
Accepted

Did many programs really store years as two characters (Y2K bug)?

87 votes
Accepted

Why does NumLock exist?

86 votes
Accepted

What made Windows Me so crash-prone?

81 votes

Why were CLIs typically light text on dark background, whereas GUIs typically use(d) dark text on light background?

79 votes
Accepted

Did any 8-bit computer system / OS have concepts for concurrency and multitasking like we know from today?

77 votes
Accepted

How did games like Doom offer free trials? What was packaged in their free trial software packages?

76 votes
Accepted

Why did the MS-DOS API choose software interrupts for its interface?

76 votes

Why does the 80486 take longer to execute simple instructions than complex ones?

75 votes

Why did the IBM PC need a sound card?

75 votes
Accepted

How was C ported to architectures that had no hardware stack?

73 votes

What was the rationale behind 36 bit computer architectures?

70 votes
Accepted

How did Woz write the Apple 1 BASIC before building the computer?

69 votes
Accepted

Why do old games use flashing as means of showing damage?

67 votes
Accepted

How does the 68060 branch predictor work?

66 votes
Accepted

Why were chips socketed in early computers?

65 votes

How did the IEC decide to create kibibytes?

64 votes
Accepted

Did personal computers ever support 8" floppies?

63 votes
Accepted

Why did line printers have 132 columns?

63 votes

Locked-up DOS computer beeped on keypress. What mechanism caused that?

63 votes

How long can a floppy disk spin for before wearing out?

62 votes
Accepted

Why was "C:" chosen for the first hard drive partition?

61 votes
Accepted

Why did trackballs disappear?

59 votes

Have programming languages driven hardware development?

58 votes
Accepted

History of Ctrl-S and Ctrl-Q for flow control

57 votes

How were files transferred between different systems in the late 1980s?

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