Compiling Four Billion If Statements

With modern tools, you have to try very hard to do something stupid, because the tools (rightly) recognize you’re doing something stupid. [Andreas Karlsson] can speak to that first hand as he…

PC-9800 Boot Sounds For Modern Computers!

There have been many computers that played a little jingle to greet you upon booting. The NEC PC-9800 is a famous example, though almost all the Macintosh computers played either the soothing &#822…

Steam Deck, Or Single Board Computer?

With a number of repair-friendly companies entering the scene, we have gained motivation to dig deeper into devices they build, repurpose them in ways yet unseen, and uncover their secrets. One suc…

Homebrew Relay Computer Features Motorized Clock

Before today, we probably would have said that scratch-built relay computers were the sole domain of only the most wizardly of graybeards. But this impressive build sent in by [Will Dana] shows tha…

Printed Portable Computer Inspired By The Classics

These days, laptop computers are all more or less the same, at least externally. Some are thicker than others, they might come in different colors, or with a 360° hinge that lets you flip the scree…

Modern In-Circuit Emulator For The 6809

The Motorola 6809, released in 1978, was the follow-up to their 6800 from four years earlier. It’s a powerful little chip with many 16-bit features, although it’s an 8-bit micro at hear…

The ’80s Multi-Processor System That Never Was

Until the early 2000s, the computer processors available on the market were essentially all single-core chips. There were some niche layouts that used multiple processors on the same board for impr…

Early “Computer Kit” Really Just A Fancy Calculator

We’re big fans of calculators, computers and vintage magazines, so when we see something at the intersection of all three we always take a look. Back in 1966, Electronics Illustrated included…

Startup Claims It Can Boost CPU Performance By 2-100X

Although Moore’s Law has slowed at bit as chip makers reach the physical limits of transistor size, researchers are having to look to other things other than cramming more transistors on a ch…

The World’s First DIY Minicomputer Was Almost Australian

The EDUC-8, a DIY minicomputer design that came out in “Electronics Australia” magazine, was almost the world’s first in August 1974. And it would have been tied for the world’s first if inventor […

Comparing X86 And 68000 In An FPGA

[Michael Kohn] started programming on the Motorola 68000 architecture and then, for work reasons, moved over to the Intel x86 and was not exactly pleased by the latter chip’s perceived shortc…

The Amiga We All Wanted In 1993

To be an Amiga fan during the dying days of the hardware platform back in the mid 1990s was to have a bleak existence indeed. Commodore had squandered what was to us the best computer ever with dis…

Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines

This neat video from the [Computer History Archives Project] documents the development of the Aiken Mark I through Mark IV computers. Partly shrouded in the secrecy of World War II and the Manhatta…

Intel’s Anti-Upgrade Tricks Defeated With Kapton Tape

If you own an Intel motherboard with a Z170 or Z270 chipset, you might believe that it only supports CPUs up to Intel’s 7th generation, known as Kaby Lake. Even the CPU socket’s pinout …

The Emperor’s New Computer

You walk into a home office and see an attractive standing desk that appears bare. Where’s the computer? Well, if it is [DIY Perk]’s office, the desk is the computer. Like a transformer…

Homebrew Computer From The Ground Up

Building a retro computer of some sort is a rite of passage for many of us, with some building replicas or restorations of old Commodores, Ataris, and other machines from decades past. Others go ev…

A Slice Of Simulation, Google Sheets Style

Have you ever tried to eat one jelly bean or one potato chip? It is nearly impossible. Some of us have the same problem with hardware projects. It all started when I wrote about the old bitslice ch…

Answering All Your ISCSI Scanner Questions

iSCSI is a widely used protocol for exposing SCSI devices over a network connection, and some scanners have in the past been equipped with SCSI ports. So, could you have an iSCSI network scanner? […

Fully 3D Printed Case Is Stacked High With Mini PCs

Over the years we’ve seen no shortage of 3D printed cases designed to hold several Raspberry Pi computers, often with the intent to use them as convenient desktop-sized platforms for experime…

256-Core RISC-V Megacluster

Supercomputers are always an impressive sight to behold, but also completely unobtainable for the ordinary person. But what if that wasn’t the case? [bitluni] shows us how it’s done wit…