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Reverse-engineering the conditional jump circuitry in the 8086 processor
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978 and it had a huge influence on computing. I'm reverse-engineering the 8086 by examining t...
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Pico Cray – Small scale distributed computing
The Pico Cray is a cluster of 8 Picos and a controller Pico. All Picos are connected in parallel by an I2C bus. The controller is designated by one GPIO being held low, the processor Pico’s addresses are allocated automatically. The Controller Pico has a 320x240px display connected by SPI and a couple of buttons. ……
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Hacking the Book8088 for better accuracy
The Book8088 is an interesting little machine. It is essentially a 1980's computer in a laptop form factor. With apologies to Sergey Kiselev...
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The next Raptor OpenPOWER systems are coming, but they won't be Power10
I'd like to first start out by saying I've been aware of new developments but made certain promises to keep my mouth shut until all the pa...
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IBM Blue Lightning: World’s Fastest 386? (2014)
One of the OS/2 Museum’s vintage boards is a genuine Made in U.S.A. Alaris Cougar. These boards were produced by IBM for Alaris and are a bit unusual: There’s a small IBM DLC3 processor in plastic package soldered on board, and there’s also a Socket 2 which accepts regular 5-Volt 486DX/SX processors or a Pentium…
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Open Circuits: The Inner Beauty of Electronic Components
Every trip to Defcon – the massive annual hacker-con in Las Vegas – is a delight. Partly it's the familiar – seeing old friends, getting updates on hacks of years gone by. But mostly, it's the surprises, the things you never anticipated. Defcon never fails to surprise.
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I chose the ThinkPad Z13 Gen1 as my Linux laptop
Blog, Podcasts, Live Streams and Videos about Linux and Open Source with a focus on Ubuntu, Debian and NixOS.
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Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 released
Time and CMOS image sensor technology has marched on since 2013. So today, we’re happy to announce the launch of Camera Module 3.
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How cheap digital verniers work (2017)
Ever wondered how cheap digital verniers are able to produce good precision at very low prices? I did, so I took one apart.
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All GB/s without FLOPS – Nvidia CMP 170HX Review
This article contains a basic Nvidia CMP 170HX performance overview, a performance lockdown workaround, a hardware teardown, a watercooling installation guide, and a repair log.
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Motorola's pioneering 8-bit 6800: Origins and architecture
Part 1 of the story of Motorola's 8-bit microprocessor design
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DIY Adapter: Using an e-bike battery to run a laptop
The goal here is to grab power from external battery packs of varying voltages and supply power to 'desktop replacement' sized laptops. This same topology can be used for Dell barrel jack systems.
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Connecting a 1980s Pinball Machine to the Internet
I built a device that allows a pinball machine from 1984 to automatically upload scores to the internet. The device taps into the machine’s memory bus and monitors the game state, uploading scores after each game.
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ThinkPad as a Server: The Follow-Up
The ThinkPad as a server is back, this time with a couple of adjustments.
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The killer features of the Steam Deck
In the beginning of the year I gave myself a late Christmas gift and bought a Steam Deck for myself. There were two main reasons I decided to buy it:
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Tracing the roots of the 8086 instruction set to the Datapoint 2200 minicomputer
The Intel 8086 processor started the x86 architecture that is still extensively used today. The 8086 has some quirky characteristics: it i...
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A DX7 USB Dongle
The amazing Rene Stange added USB Gadget (i.e. device) support to the Circle bare metal Raspberry Pi environment a while ago so I’ve now incorporated that into MiniDexed. This allows MiniDexe…
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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
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Knots smaller than human hair make materials unusually tough
A micro-architected material made from tiny knots proves tougher and more durable than unknotted counterparts.
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Inception: A simple XOR can cause a Microarchitectural Stack Overflow
Over the past one and a half years, we have studied two phenomena that enable an unprivileged attacker to leak arbitrary information on all modern AMD CPUs:
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The Intel 386 processor die: the clock circuit
Processors are driven by a clock, which controls the timing of each step inside the chip. In this blog post, I'll examine the clock-generati...
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SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…