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About me and the blog

My name is Marcin Wichary. I’ve worked as a UX designer, typographer, front-end person, and manager at Google, Medium, and Figma. I’ve also written a book about keyboards and typing, gave talks, and published essays about design, typography, and technology.

Unsung is my blog about software craft and quality.

More info about Unsung

Send me feedback, tips, bug reports, and anything else:

More info about Unsung

“An extremely minor technical problem”

A fascinating deep dive look at one of the most well-known bugs in computing history, the 1993 Pentium FDIV bug. Ken Shiriff actually grabbed a microscope to analyze the processor and mapped out exactly what happened on the hardware level, and the details of Intel’s (surprising) fix.

Also, an interesting detail of what ended up being Intel’s self-own:

The problem might have quietly ended here, except that Intel decided to restrict which customers could get a replacement. If a customer couldn’t convince an Intel engineer that they needed the accuracy, they couldn’t get a fixed Pentium. Users were irate to be stuck with faulty chips so they took their complaints to online groups.