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Back in the 80s, buying a home computer could easily mean an inflation-adjusted cost of thousands of dollars (or your equivalent currency unit of choice), and all for an 8-bit …read more

Among so many other technological advances, the Cold War saw the advent of the ballistic missile submarine. The concept was simple—pack enough nuclear warheads to destroy a small civilization into …read more

In the long ago, pre-internet days when your clock project wasn’t an ESP32 getting its timing via NTP over WiFi, it was still possible to build a wirelessly-updating clock. All …read more

While most of us don’t design aircraft or racing cars, it’s likely that we’re still fascinated by some of the aerodynamic studies behind them. But a full-sized wind tunnel is …read more

There is a drawing of a bicycle in one of Leonarda DaVinci‘s sketchbooks– except it wasn’t drawn by DaVinci, and dates long after his death, so we can’t say the …read more

In some parts of the world it’s common for cell service providers to sell new phones at a price significantly below market value, with the caveat that these phones are …read more

We’ve covered etch-a-sketch robots before, but usually they’re not quite as fast as [Every Flavor of Robot]’s “video” etch-a-sketch, capable of drawing a full portrait in as little as a …read more

The Honeywell X2S Smart Thermostat is a Wi-Fi-enabled thermostat that is meant to integrate with your typical ‘smart home’ setup, with mobile app control available as well. Of course, just …read more

The Commodore 64 has, by modern standards, the interesting power requirement of needing both 5 VDC and 9 VAC. Traditionally, one would use an iron-core transformer to step-down the wall …read more

There’s a line in a [Weird Al] (no relation) song that says, “I upgrade my system at least twice a day…” I know how that is. I primarily use a …read more

Zinc air batteries have been a familiar sight for decades in the world of photography, where they provided an environmentally less dangerous alternative to mercury cells. They operate by the …read more

The 2000s was a decade of great change in the computer industry. The world had grown accustomed to corruptible floppy disks, blue screens of death, and achingly slow load times. …read more

After the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began operations in 2022, it soon made a tantalizing discovery in the form of mysterious red dots: small, red-tinted astronomical objects of unknown …read more

Gravity batteries aren’t exactly a new idea. You can store energy by lifting something heavy, converting kinetic energy into potential energy. To get it back, you let the mass fall …read more

Computing goes hand-in-hand with how to structure and access data, and this internal training film from IBM regarding file organization and data processing with System/360 is from a time when …read more

Glass-based substrates are slowly beginning to push out organic substrates – as also commonly used in PCBs – due to often superior material properties for packaging. One area where glass …read more

There are many ways you can implement an Intel i386 CPU on an FPGA, with the use of original microcode probably being one of the most interesting approaches. This is …read more

Some of you may know there’s a version of UNIX for the Commodore Amiga, aptly called Amiga Unix or AMIX. There is an almost complete record of versions from 1.0 …read more

Unless you’ve managed to avoid touching a Windows computer until after the Windows XP era, it’s pretty good odds you’ve played Space Cadet Pinball. Some of you may have even …read more

There are a surprising number of experiments an amateur nuclear physicist can perform, from making a Geiger counter to fusing hydrogen atoms in a fusor. One project which we haven’t …read more