Top all-time · #22297
mattst88's blog
Personal blog · mattst88.com/blog · on HN as mattst88systemshardware
mattst88's blog is a personal blog at mattst88.com about systems and hardware. Since 2012, 3 different Hacker News readers have linked it 7 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (1) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
The linked post is Denthor's essay on why he became a programmer, covering his early DOS and assembly programming background. The one comment adds other 1990s DOS and assembly reference resources to it.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 1 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
mattst88's blog
What Hacker News says?
Besides the Asphyxia Trainers, back then there was also HelpPC [0], PCGPE [1], RBIL [2], and mammon_'s work in ASM Journal [3] available on BBSes and early interwebs. [0] http://stanislavs.org/helppc/ [1] http://www.oocities.org/siliconvalley/2151/pcgpe.html [2] http://www.ctyme.com/rbrown.htm [3] http://mattst88.com/programming/AssemblyProgrammersJournal
Comment linking /programming/AssemblyProgrammersJournal
on “Denthor's Graphics Tutorials: Why I am a Programmer”Submitted Reverse Engineering the Prom for the SGI O2 as a story · 13 points
HN discussiondosdude1 is awesome. He replaced the BGA CPU in my iMac G4 with a 1.7 GHz MC7448 ( https://mattst88.com/computers/imacg4/ ) and made a video about the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnpdLt4OIFs He's got two videos about this custom IDE SSD on his YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YrBz-6lXbZQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMCz0VsEbqc
Comment linking /computers/imacg4/
on “Dosdude – A custom-designed IDE SSD for old PCs”Submitted Optimizing pixman for Loongson: Process and Results as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://mattst88.com/ A blog I rarely write, and some pages about my collection of pet computers.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Share Your Personal Site”Submitted Optimizing pixman for Loongson: Process and Results as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI think they're super uncommon in the west. I think they're also super useless, to be honest. Incredibly slow. Linux support continued to degrade the entire time I owned mine. The keyboard and display are far too small to be usable. The graphics chip accelerates basically nothing. I sold mine [1] on eBay back in October. I hope the new owner enjoys it more than I did :) [1] https://mattst88.com/computers/yeeloong/
Comment linking /computers/yeeloong/
on “Working around dragons with the Lemote Yeeloong laptop and OpenBSD”