HeyJaredProgramming at the right level
Short posts about programming, computer history and retro computing.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 4
- Latest publication
- Aug 13, 2026
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- Jul 11, 2026
Latest issues
Twenty Years of my Open Source Project (opens the original)
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In the fall of 2005, my employer was acquired by another company, and I was transferred to the team that developed a centralized translation memory system. The group had a strong not-invented-here culture, which I did not appreciate at the time1. One example of functionality that, in my opinion, should have been reused rather than rewritten was the handling of UTF‑8 encoded text. I looked around to find some portable C++ open-source libraries to prove my p
The Road to MS-DOS 2 (opens the original)
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MS-DOS was an unwanted child. Tim Paterson developed its predecessor 86-DOS only because he urgently needed some kind of operating system for the 8086-based CPU board his employer Seattle Computer Products (SCP) had already released. He really wanted to create a “proper” multitasking system, and knew how to do it, having developed something similar for the Z80 as a school project1. However, the system was needed quickly, so he and his boss agreed to start with so
When Compilers Disagree About UTF‑8 (opens the original)
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In the summer of 2006 I started an open-source C++ library for handling UTF-8 strings. I wanted it to be portable and to work well with STL but did not go crazy with optimizations at the time. Recently, as I started writing about UTF-8 decoding, I spent more time revisiting the internals of the library. The function I decided to optimize decodes a UTF-8 encoded code point: template <typename octet_iterat
StarLink from 1984 (opens the original)
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In May 1984, Digital Research Inc (DRI) announced a product called StarLink1. It was described as a “hardware/software combination to expand the IBM PC into a multiuser system”2 . The hardware portion was a board containing an Intel 8088 CPU, 64KB of RAM and four RS-232 interfaces for connecting <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/news/the-forgotten-world-of-dumb-terminals"
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