ExplainingComputers has a sentence on its About page that feels almost rebellious in 2026: “this website is not a blog.”
Christopher Barnatt maintains the site as a companion to his ExplainingComputers video work, but the website has its own old-school logic. Instead of pouring every new subject into an endless reverse-chronological stream, it maintains standing reference pages organized by topic.
Hardware. Software. Storage. Single-board computers. AI. RISC-V. Cloud computing. Quantum computing. Security. Linux. Windows. Free software.
The page changes when the subject changes.
Pages instead of posts
Barnatt’s background helps explain the approach. His About page says he spent 25 years lecturing at Nottingham University Business School, continues freelance academic work, and has authored 13 books.
The site behaves like teaching material rather than a publication calendar.
Its headline pages are updated as needed to reflect new material instead of becoming frozen posts with progressively less useful dates. The homepage also explicitly says the site contains no advertising or sponsored links, while the About page separately states that there is no AI-generated content.
That makes ExplainingComputers an interesting bridge between two generations of the web.
It is tied to YouTube and current computing topics, but structurally it still resembles the hand-built educational websites that predated creator platforms. A visitor can move laterally through subjects without having to reconstruct the useful material from hundreds of timestamped posts.
The design is plain enough that the hierarchy remains visible.
That is increasingly unusual.
Modern publishing systems are optimized to create new URLs. Reference sites are optimized to make existing URLs better.
ExplainingComputers chose the second job.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list includes many sites whose longevity comes from treating webpages as durable objects instead of disposable feed entries.
ExplainingComputers is still current, but it follows that older logic.
Sometimes the best way to keep a website useful is to refuse to turn it into a stream.