When IBM machines threatened to make her job obsolete, Dorothy Vaughan didn’t retreat—she learned FORTRAN and taught her entire team. Her story offers a blueprint for surviving technological change in any era.

Running 10PRINT and 100 Doors on the Clockwork Pi PicoCalc, a retro-inspired Raspberry Pi Pico handheld running PicoMite BASIC.

Solving the classic McNuggets Problem in Commodore BASIC: what’s the largest number of nuggets you can’t buy with 6, 9, and 20 packs?

Why your algorithm choice matters: comparing linear search O(n) vs binary search O(log n) with implementations in Commodore BASIC and Python.

An introduction to Linear Feedback Shift Registers: how they work, building one on a breadboard with shift registers and XOR gates, and implementing them in Python and Rust.

Understanding two’s complement: how computers represent negative numbers, why it simplifies hardware design, and how to work with signed integers in assembly and high-level languages.

Understanding the MOS paper tape format used by the KIM-1 and other 6502 systems. Breaking down the hex format line by line with checksum verification.

Recreating the visual 100 door problem from vintage 8-bit machines in Python using the Asciimatics library for ASCII screen positioning.

Generating all 362,880 permutations of 1-9 the hard way: understanding algorithms instead of relying on library functions. Implementations in Python, BASIC, and 6502 assembly.