Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever
Back in 2021, a collector friend of ours was visiting a dusty warehouse in search of Apollo-era communications equipment. A box with NASA-style lights caught his eye—the "AGC Confirm" light
Have you ever wanted to reverse engineer an analog chip from a die photo? Wanted to understand what's inside the "black box" of an integrated circuit? In this article, I explain my reverse
Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line. This chip was packaged in a ceramic square with 132 gold-plated pins protruding from the underside, fitting into a
I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/output (I/O) pins. Since these pins communicate with the outside
I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science, and a paper mentioned the compound Cr2Gr2Te6. For a moment, I thought my knowledge of the periodic table was slipping, since I couldn't remember
The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, punctuated with reddish-orange diamonds. Although this
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I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex processor at the time, containing 285,000 transistors.
Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers. But in 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point coprocessor, performing floating-point operations up to 100
In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip. Plugging it into your IBM PC would make operations up
In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture. Unlike modern 64-bit processors, however, the 8086 is a 16-bit chip. Its arithmetic/logic