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. In a few short years, all of that would change, as USB drives, better operating systems, and faster processors brought forth a new age of stability and speed.
Amidst this era of upheaval, Microsoft introduced a new technology. It was intended to increase performance on the cheap to a new generation of machines, but it would turn out to be little more than a gimmick that never really caught on. Let’s explore the easily-forgotten legacy of ReadyBoost.
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 origin and composition. So far well over 300 of such little red dots (LRDs) have been identified, with many theories on what they are. Fortunately the Chandra X-ray Observatory recently added some more clues as detailed in an accompanying paper.
Current theories include them being a form of primordial galaxy, or a supermassive black holes embedded in a dense gas cloud. The LRD discussed in the paper with the designation 3DHST-AEGIS-12014 was found to emit X-rays unlike other LRDs. By comparing the data between JWST and Chandra for this LRD it lends credence to the theory that these LRDs are a transitional phase as a supermassive black hole ingests the material of said gas cloud.
X-rays produced during this can sometimes make it out of the gas cloud, after which we can observe it. If that’s the case, these LRDs should cease to exist the moment the black hole has consumed enough of the cloud, which is something that we may be able to find evidence for if we’re lucky.
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 and convert that motion to electricity. [Valeriamayara22] shows how to build a working demonstration model of such a system.
This isn’t free energy. Something has to lift the weight. In this case, the height is 1.8 meters, and the mass is 15.65 kg. Even so, the model achieves 13 W peak output and 58% efficiency, according to the post. Reportedly, it takes 394 drops of the weight to fully charge an iPhone 16, so this isn’t a practical project, but it does show how a gravity battery works. One nice thing is that the system stores as much energy on its 1,000,000 th charge as it does on the first one, especially if you keep the chain lubricated. Try that with a chemical battery.
The mechanical part uses a bicycle chain and some sprockets. There is a battery to even things out since, like wind power, when you make energy with a mechanical battery, you either use it now or lose it.
The cost of the build is about $400, and there’s a GitHub repo with all the files if you want to take your own shot at it. The energy efficiency number references the potential energy stored versus the energy produced. Obviously, if you are using some other energy source to lift the weight, that’s another calculation.
As you might expect, a practical system like this can be very large.
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 such decisions were crucial to system architecture.
Some trends never change, like storage costs over time.
The presenter talks about the transition from magnetic tape-based storage (in which data is stored and must be read sequentially) to DASD (direct access storage devices) which have more in common with modern mass storage media. The ability to access and process data at will instead of sequentially represented a tremendous opportunity to change how organizations handled data. System/360 redefined mainframe computing, introducing not just the concept of compatibility and interoperability of programs and data between systems, but also popularized the 8-bit byte.
It’s not a particularly long presentation and it doesn’t go into deep technical detail — it was primarily aimed at sales people — but it does offer an interesting peek into a time period in computing history that most of us have little or no direct experience with. Nevertheless some things never change, like a trend of plummeting storage prices (listed as cost per million characters) over time.
Check it out in the video embedded below, and if you’d like to know more about IBM’s System/360 we have you covered.
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 substrates have however struggled is with through-hole vias and providing the conductive copper path through them. A 2024 article by [Keith Best] gives a good overview of the topic, with recent news showing how much companies like Intel are pushing for glass substrates, specifically for the packaging of dies.
One major advantage with vias in glass substrates is that they can be much smaller, enabling smaller than 0.1 mm diameter holes with far finer pitch. The challenge here is to make perfect holes with a laser that are defect-free, as well as have the intended diameter.
After that this through-glass via (TGV) has to be coated or filled with copper, much like their organic equivalent. Said TGV can be fully filled with copper, or use plating and add dielectric filler. Detecting flaws in such a finished TGV is important.
In a 2025 review article of glass substrate technologies by [Pratik Nimbalkar] et al. published in Chips the state of the art at the time was covered. The need for ever higher-density integration options with ASICs is highlight here, especially now that many chips today consist of multiple interconnected dies inside a single package.
The complications of creating TGVs with femtosecond laser pulses in Borofloat 33 glass are highlighted by [Daniel Franz] et al. in a 2025 research article, with microcracks and backside ablation observed without proper precautions, something which previously was often resolved by an etching step following said laser drilling. The main issue here is the post-drilling residual stress from the thermal shock, which the authors demonstrate can be largely prevented with careful tweaking of the laser drilling parameters.
As pointed out in a 2024 review article by [Chen Yu] et al. glass substrates are useful for far more than just high-density chip packaging. Glass substrates are also chemically resistant, have a higher heat resistance, are largely transparent to RF and can be hermetically sealed against outside influences. This makes them great for various advanced sensors and communication devices.
Meanwhile, if you wanted to do some metal-depositing on glass at home, we covered this recently.
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 what [nand2mario]’s z386 project does, with a recent blog post summarizing development on this FPGA project so far.
This project is similar to the previously developed z8086 project, which as one may guess does something similar, except for the Intel 8086 CPU. By executing the original microcode you’re basically guaranteeing close compatibility with the original hardware, though of course the sheer scale of this microcode between an 8086 and 80386 is quite different.
There’s a much larger instruction set with a correspondingly much more complicated internal state to keep track of, including all those newfangled features like memory management, paging and register debugging, as well extensions to protected mode that began with the i286.
Currently z386 runs on a number of FPGAs, including the Altera Cyclone V and Gowin GW5A, with performance equivalent to a ~70 MHz i386 albeit with slightly worse cycle efficiency, some of which could be due to the limited 16 kB cache compared to the 32+ kB cache in the fastest i386 CPUs. Either way, it’s more than enough to run all kinds of software, including games like DOOM.
Important to note is that the goal here isn’t to be more performant than cores such as for example ao486, but more as an archaeological reconstruction of the original hardware and its interaction with said microcode.
Top image: line-up of Intel 286, 386 and 486 CPUs. (Credit: Sgroey, Wikimedia)
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 to 2.03, but 2.02 was lost media–until [Forgotten Computer] found it on an old Amiga.
It starts with an auction held for the 40 year anniversary of the Free Software Foundation where, by just one second, the highest bidder was too late. What do you do first with an artifact as valuable as an old FSF computer? You image the hard drive. Then you make several copies, including on different computers–after all, you wouldn’t want to lose the data on it. Preservation secured, the natural next thing is to boot it–and that’s when we see the magic 2.02c version number.
According to thorough digging by [Forgotten Computer], this version was–until now–lost.
In the video after the break, [Forgotten Computer] goes over what Amiga Unix is, the discovery process, and explores what’s on the disk–including FSF staples like GCC, G++ and core utilities like GNU less. Continue reading “Lost Version Of Amiga Unix Suddenly Reappears”→
