Collaborate Disseminate
The Apple-I was a far cry from Apple’s later products. A $666 single-board computer, the product had some unique design features including using a shift register for video memory to …read more Continue reading [Ken Shirriff] Takes a Bite of the Apple-I
As we approach the moment in the year at which websites enter a festive silly season of scrambling to find any story with a festive angle, we’re pleased to see …read more Continue reading A Particularly Festive Chip Decapping
We’re unabashed fans of [Ken Shirriff] here at Hackaday, and his latest post about an Apollo-era transistorized shift register doesn’t disappoint. Of course, nowadays a 16-bit shift register is nothing …read more Continue reading Apollo Shift Register is Discrete
It’s no secret that the work of [Ken Sherriff] graces the front pages of Hackaday quite frequently. He’s back again, this time reverse engineering a comparator chip from a photo …read more Continue reading [Ken Sherriff] Picks Apart Mystery Chip from Twitter Photo
The 1980s and early 1990s were a bit of an odd time for semiconductor technology, with the various transistor technologies that had been used over the decades slowly making way …read more Continue reading Logic Chip Teardown From Early 1990s IBM ES/9000 Mainframe
We are always glad to see [Ken Shirriff] tear into something new and this month he’s looking inside a quartz oscillator module. Offhand, you’d think there’s not much to these. A slab of quartz and some sort of inverter, right? …read more
We’ve seen so many explorations of older semiconductors at the hands of [Ken Shirriff], that we know enough to expect a good read when he releases a new one. His latest doesn’t disappoint, as he delves into the workings of one of the first hand-held electronic calculators. The Sharp EL-8 …read more
Continue reading Reverse Engineering Silicon From The First Pocket Calculator
FPGAs are somewhat the IPv6 of integrated circuits — they’ve been around longer than you might think, they let you do awesome things that people are intrigued by initially, but they’ve never really broke out of their niches until rather recently. There’s still a bit of a myth and mystery …read more
Continue reading What’s Inside An FPGA? Ken Shirriff Has (Again) The Answer
We always look forward to a new blog post by [Ken Shirriff] and this latest one didn’t cure us of that. His topic this time? Comparing two Game Boy audio chips. People have noticed before that the Game Boy Color sounds very different than a classic Game Boy, and he …read more
Continue reading Comparing Bare Silicon on Two Game Boy Audio Chips
Longtime followers of [Ken Shirriff’s] work are accustomed to say asking “Where does he get such wonderful toys?”. This time around he’s laid bare the guidance computer from a Titan missile. To be specific, this is the computer that would have been found in the Titan II, an intercontinental ballistic …read more
Continue reading Ken Shirriff Unfolds a Nuclear Missile Guidance Computer with Impressive Memory