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Reverse-engineering the TL431: the most common chip you’ve never heard of (2014)
This article is now available in Russian: Реверс-инжиниринг TL431, крайне распространенной микросхемы, о которой вы и не слышали . A die p...
Ken Shirriff
Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever
- Popular posts
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- #12 personal
Visit righto.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jul 2013 – Oct 2026
Hardware & Electronics 171History & Retro Computing 128Systems & Performance 21Software Engineering 10Crypto & Blockchain 9Security & Privacy 7
32
Bitcoin mining on a vintage Xerox Alto: very slow at 1.5 hashes/second
I've been restoring a Xerox Alto minicomputer from the 1970s and figured it would be interesting to see if it could mine bitcoins. I coded u...
33
Counterfeit Macbook charger teardown: convincing outside but dangerous inside
What's inside a counterfeit Macbook charger? After my Macbook charger teardown , a reader sent me a charger he suspected was counterfeit. ...
34
How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
35
Undocumented 8086 instructions, explained by the microcode
What happens if you give the Intel 8086 processor an instruction that doesn't exist? A modern microprocessor (80186 and later) will gener...
36
Xerox Alto zero-day: cracking disk password protection on a 45 year old system
We've been archiving a bunch of old Xerox Alto disk packs from the 1970s. A few of them turned out to be password-protected, so I needed ...
37
Hacker News comments I'm tired of seeing
As a long-time reader of Hacker News, I keep seeing some comments they don't really contribute to the conversation. Since the discussions a...
38
Improvements to the Xerox Alto Mandelbrot drop runtime from 1 hour to 9 minutes
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...
39
Reverse engineering a counterfeit 7805 voltage regulator
Update: It turns out my 7805 isn't counterfeit. eclectro did an in-depth search ( details on reddit ) and found an old 7805 datasheet fro...
40
Apollo Guidance Computer switching power supply works after 50 years
We recently restored an Apollo Guidance Computer, the revolutionary computer that helped navigate to the Moon and land on its surface. 1 At...
41
Reverse-engineering the Intel 8086's instruction register
The Intel 8086 microprocessor is one of the most influential chips ever created; it led to the x86 architecture that dominates desktop an...
42
Bitcoins the hard way: Using the raw Bitcoin protocol
All the recent media attention on Bitcoin inspired me to learn how Bitcoin really works, right down to the bytes flowing through the netwo...
43
Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
44
Unusual circuits in the Intel 386's standard cell logic
I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently. The 386, introduced in 1985, was Intel's most complex pr...
45
A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
46
Bitcoin mining on an Apollo Guidance Computer
We've been restoring an Apollo Guidance Computer 1 . Now that we have the world's only working AGC, I decided to write some code for it. Try...
47
Reverse-engineering a three-axis attitude indicator from the F-4 fighter plane
We recently received an attitude indicator for the F-4 fighter plane, an instrument that uses a rotating ball to show the aircraft's orienta...
48
Standard cells: Looking at individual gates in the Pentium processor
Intel released the powerful Pentium processor in 1993, a chip to "separate the really power-hungry folks from ordinary mortals." The origin...
49
Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
50
Hands-on with the PocketBeagle: a $25 Linux computer with lots of I/O pins
The PocketBeagle is a tiny but powerful inexpensive key-fob-sized open source Linux computer. It has 44 digital I/O pins, 8 analog input...
51
Reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip from die photos
Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation ch...
52
Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
53
Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old today
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely...
54
Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sou...
55
Reverse-engineering Ethernet backoff on the Intel 82586 network chip's die
Introduced in 1973, Ethernet is the predominant way of wiring computers together. Chips were soon introduced to handle the low-level aspects...
56
The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
57
Inside the digital clock from a Soyuz spacecraft
We recently obtained a clock that flew on a Soyuz space mission. 1 The clock, manufactured in 1984, is much more complex inside than you'd ...
58
The Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight (2023)
The Soviet space program used completely different controls and instruments from American spacecraft. One of the most interesting navigati...
59
The transparent chip inside a vintage Hewlett-Packard floppy drive
While repairing an eight-inch HP floppy drive, we found that the problem was a broken interface chip. Since the chip was bad, I decapped it ...
60
TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...