Oh wow, I clicked that link without reading the last section of your comment, and was like “Fabian Giesen!”, an absolute HN favourite: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=fgiesen
Same; any time I see BWT I think of Fabian Giesen. I think he was only 16 or 17 when he wrote that article.
By chance I once sat near him and the rest of Farbrausch at a demoparty, but I was too shy to say hi.
The author later wrote many now-famous articles, including A Trip Through the Graphics Pipeline.