The Curious Engineer

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Programming at the right level

nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com

Posts about programming, computer history and retro computing. Click to read Programming at the right level, by Nemanja Trifunovic, a Substack publication with hundreds of subscribers.

Computing historyDOS / vintage PCAssemblyC++

’24’25’26
Posts
40 from 15 Dec 2024 to 24 Oct 2026
Posting
monthly (18 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
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https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/feed

2026 15

  1. Taming Intel’s “Brain Damaged” Chip
  2. Decoding UTF-8. Part VIII: Validating Decoder
  3. Twenty Years of my Open Source Project
  4. The Road to MS-DOS 2
  5. When Compilers Disagree About UTF‑8
  6. StarLink from 1984
  7. The Peak and Collapse of Digital Research
  8. Inside MP/M's Process Dispatcher
  9. Kay Nishi and the Meeting that Started MS-DOS
  10. Why IBM Turned to Microsoft for BASIC
  11. Decoding UTF-8. Part VII: Validation
  12. Gary Kildall, Bill Gates and the "Gentleman's Agreement"
  13. AArch64 Bitfield Move (BFM) Instruction
  14. How Much of CP/M’s Design Ended Up in MS‑DOS?
  15. Decoding UTF-8. Part VI: Simplistic Non-Validating Decoder

2025 23

  1. The Late Arrival of 16-bit CP/M
  2. An Old-School Introduction to Position Independent Code
  3. PDP-10 and Microcomputers
  4. Decoding UTF-8. Part V: Benchmarking Sequence Length Calculations
  5. Getting Started with the Fuse Emulator for ZX Spectrum
  6. When Compiler Optimizations Hurt Performance
  7. History of the GEM Desktop Environment
  8. Decoding UTF-8. Part IV: Determining Sequence Length - Counting Leading Bits
  9. Decoding UTF-8. Part III: Determining Sequence Length - A Lookup Table
  10. When the IBM PC Came to Town
  11. Counting Leading Zeros in a Byte
  12. Decoding UTF-8. Part II: Determining Sequence Length - a Straightforward Approach
  13. A Tale of Two Red-Bearded Visionaries
  14. Decoding UTF-8. Part I: Manual Decoding
  15. Birth of 86-DOS
  16. Disassembly with LLDB
  17. The Curious Case of Jupiter Ace
  18. Disassembly with gdb
  19. Could DOS Have Been a Scaled-Down Version of Xenix?
  20. Veneers on Arm64 Windows
  21. 6502 is a Good Starting Point for Beginning Assembly Programming
  22. Load Effective Address for Mere Mortals
  23. Hello MessageBox on Windows ARM64

2024 2

  1. Using ARM64 Assembly on Windows
  2. A History of C and C++ Character Data Types