A teardown of Apple's 2012 iPhone charger reveals a compact, high-quality switching power supply design using an STMicrosystems L6565 controller IC and flyback transformer, justifying its premium pric…
The article details the reverse engineering of a processor board from the Mitra 125 MS minicomputer, which was used to control the European-built Spacelab module flown on the Space Shuttle. Unlike mod…
The article describes the electromechanical Angle Computer, an analog device used in the B-52 bomber's Astro Compass system during the 1960s to automate celestial navigation before GPS. Unlike a digit…
The article summarizes the history of IBM's System/4 Pi family of aerospace computers, introduced around 1967, which were used in military aircraft, missiles, submarines, and NASA programs like Skylab…
The Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor determined whether an instruction was intended for it by monitoring the computer's bus via its Bus Interface Unit (BIU) for specific "ESCAPE" opcodes assigned…
The Intel 8086, introduced in 1978, is a 16-bit processor whose arithmetic-logic unit (ALU) performs 28 operations, including addition, subtraction, and bitwise logic. The ALU is controlled by a combi…
The Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, released in the 1980s, could accelerate floating-point calculations on IBM PCs by up to 100 times using complex algorithms implemented in microcode. The chip…
The Intel 8087, introduced in 1980, was a floating-point coprocessor that performed calculations up to 100 times faster than early microprocessors, significantly benefiting IBM PC applications like Au…
The Intel 386 processor, introduced in 1985 with 285,000 transistors, used standard cell logic—an automated place-and-route technique—to meet its production schedule after falling behind. The article …
The article describes how the author used the MiniZinc constraint solver to solve the New York Times' daily Pips puzzle, where dominoes must be placed on a grid to satisfy specific conditions like sum…
The article describes how Diné weaver Marilou Schultz created a rug depicting the internal circuitry of the 555 timer integrated circuit, using thick white lines for metallic wiring, a black backgroun…
The article explains that the compound "Cr2Gr2Te6" is a persistent typo for the real compound Cr2Ge2Te6 (chromium germanium telluride), where "Gr" mistakenly replaces "Ge" (germanium). This error has …
The article summarizes the reverse-engineering of the Intel 386 processor's input/output (I/O) circuits, which protect the chip from static electricity, latchup, and metastability. It details how spec…
A CT scan of Intel's 1986 386 processor revealed that its ceramic package contains six layers of complex internal wiring, including two separate power and ground networks for I/O and CPU logic. The sc…
The article explains the process of reverse engineering an analog integrated circuit using the Philips TDA7000 FM radio receiver chip as an example. It describes how to identify key components like bi…
A collector discovered an empty chassis labeled "AGC Confirm" in a warehouse, later finding its missing circuit boards in a bag elsewhere, which turned out to be an "Up-Data Link Confidence Test Set" …
The Apollo FDAI, or "8-ball," was a critical instrument that displayed the spacecraft's orientation (roll, pitch, and yaw) using a rotating black-and-white ball and guidance needles. The ball could ro…
The 386 processor, introduced by Intel in 1985, used a 16-byte instruction prefetch queue to improve performance by fetching instructions from memory before they were needed, taking advantage of idle …
The Intel 386 processor, introduced in 1985, was the first 32-bit CPU in the x86 architecture and contains numerous registers that provide much faster storage than main memory. The processor's registe…
The article describes the repair of a non-working Commodore PET computer from 1977, part of the "1977 Trinity" of early home computers. The repair was challenging due to multiple failed custom ROM and…