Cool stuff to stumble upon, new and old.
What’s Cool? · What’s Cool? II · What’s Cool? III · What’s Cool? IV · What’s Cool? V

• Fonts before Mac (1983)
  Font archeology on the Mac – learn why the original Macintosh system font was called “Elefont” and how it evolved, together with other early bitmap fonts for the Mac. Susan Kare’s pixel work is always worth contemplating in awe! Bonus: Through this article, I’ve learned what a Twiggy Mac is.
• Those Secret Fonts from the ISA-16 PS/2 Models (Again)
  More font archeology, but in the IBM PC world and five years later: VileR traces back the origins of some extra ROM fonts in certain PS/2 models to an internal IBM software package. Fascinating detective work, leaving no stone pixel unturned!
• Fredrik Liljegren on the creation of Pinball Dreams
  Fast forward four more years, and we’ve arrived in 1992 when The Silents set out to publish their first game, Pinball Dreams, and founded “Digital Illusions”, nowadays known as “DICE”. This interview sheds some light on how it all came to be: One guy drew a multi-screen pinball table and the others thought: Heh, interesting… Ah, the simpler times! :)
• More retrocomputing, less nostalgia
  Speaking of simpler times: Is it really nostalgia when we still hand-pixel pretty pictures on the Amiga to this day, or compose SID tunes for the C64? Or is it more about the fun in exercising crafts you’ve learnt in your youth and simply still enjoy? I would agree that “real nostalgia” hits different; the other day, I was struck out of the blue with the feeling how incredibly cool it was in 1995 that my feeble Amiga could play along on the internet: browsing the web, sending e-mail around the planet, learning HTML from other websites, creating your own content for the whole world to see. It’s bittersweet how that level of excitement can never be brought back, but it’s also blissful and rewarding to keep using that ol’ box!
• Yes, you can store data on a bird
  I’m sure this story is currently making the rounds everywhere in the geekosphere, but the headline is just golden. As is the tech, in hardware and biological form: a bird drawing a bird in the spectogram!