Retro Computer Goes Back To The 1950s

December 6, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 24 Comments

When thinking of retrocomputing, many of us will imagine machines such as the Commodore 64 or Apple II. These computers were very popular and have plenty of parts and documentation available. Fewer will go back to the Intel 8008 or even 4004 era which were the first integrated circuit chips commercially available. But before even those transistor-based computers is a retrocomputing era rarely touched on: the era of programmable vacuum tube machines. [Mike] has gone back to the 1950s with this computer which uses vacuum tubes instead of transistors.

The computer has an eight-bit architecture and features most of the components of any modern transistor-based computer of similar computational ability. Memory, I/O, an arithmetic logic unit including a carry bit that allows it to do 16-bit arithmetic, are all implemented using 6N3P dual triode tubes that date to the 50s and 60s and would have been used in similar computers like the IBM 700. All of this drives a flight simulator program or a Fibonacci number generator, demonstrating its general purpose computing capabilities.

Of course, tubes were generally phased out in favor of transistors largely due to their power and space requirements; [Mike] needs a stepladder to maintain this computer as well as around ten minutes each time he starts it up to allow the tubes to warm up, with each module needing over three amps of current each. It’s a hugely impressive build and we’d recommend checking out the video linked below to get more details on its operation. If you’re looking for something a little more accessible to get into the world of vacuum tubes, this single-board tube computer fits the bill.

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

June 12, 2024 by Bryan Cockfield 47 Comments

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 chip to increase CPU performance. ARM is having a bit of a moment by improving the performance-per-watt of many computing platforms, but some other ideas need to come to the forefront to make any big pushes in this area. This startup called Flow Computing claims it can improve modern CPUs by a significant amount with a slight change to their standard architecture.

It hopes to make these improvements by adding a parallel processing unit, which they call the “back end” to a more-or-less standard CPU, the “front end”. These two computing units would be on the same chip, with a shared bus allowing them to communicate extremely quickly with the front end able to rapidly offload tasks to the back end that are more inclined for parallel processing. Since the front end maintains essentially the same components as a modern CPU, the startup hopes to maintain backwards compatibility with existing software while allowing developers to optimize for use of the new parallel computing unit when needed.

While we’ll take a step back and refrain from claiming this is the future of computing until we see some results and maybe a prototype or two, the idea does show some promise and is similar to some ARM computers which have multiple cores optimized for different tasks, or other computers which offload non-graphics tasks to a GPU which is more optimized for processing parallel tasks. Even the Raspberry Pi is starting to take advantage of external GPUs for tasks like these.

Hackaday Links: March 17, 2024

March 17, 2024 by Dan Maloney 16 Comments

A friend of ours once described computers as “high-speed idiots.” It was true in the 80s, and it appears that even with the recent explosion in AI, all computers have managed to do is become faster. Proof of that can be found in a story about using ASCII art to trick a chatbot into giving away the store. As anyone who has played with ChatGPT or its moral equivalent for more than five minutes has learned, there are certain boundary conditions that the LLM’s ~~creators~~ lawyers have put in place to prevent discussion surrounding sensitive topics. Ask a chatbot to deliver specific instructions on building a nuclear bomb, for instance, and you’ll be rebuffed. Same with asking for help counterfeiting currency, and wisely so. But, by minimally obfuscating your question by rendering the word “COUNTERFEIT” in ASCII art and asking the chatbot to first decode the word, you can slip the verboten word into a how-to question and get pretty explicit instructions. Yes, you have to give painfully detailed instructions on parsing the ASCII art characters, but that’s a small price to pay for forbidden knowledge that you could easily find out yourself by other means.

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Absorbing Traffic Noise With Bricks Using Helmholtz Resonators

December 24, 2023 by Maya Posch 25 Comments

One inevitable aspect of cities and urban life in general is that it is noisy, with traffic being one of the main sources of noise pollution. Finding a way to attenuate especially the low-frequency noise of road traffic was the subject of [Joe Krcma]’s Masters Thesis, the results of which he gave a talk on at the Portland Maker Meetup Club after graduating from University College London. The chosen solution in his thesis are Helmholtz resonators, which are a kind of acoustic spring. Using a carefully selected opening into the cavity, frequencies can be filtered out, and extinguished inside the cavity.

Basic functionality and formula used to determine the dimensions of a Helmholtz Resonator.

As examples of existing uses of Helmholtz resonators in London, he points at the Queen Elizabeth Hall music venue, as well as the newly opened Queen Elizabeth Line and Paddington Station. For indoor applications there are a number of commercial offerings, but could this be applied to outdoor ceramics as well, to render urban environments into something approaching an oasis of peace and quiet?

For the research, [Joe]’s group developed a number of Helmholtz resonator designs and manufacturing methods, with [Joe] focusing on clay fired versions. For manufacturing, 3D printing of the clay was attempted, which didn’t work out too well. This was followed by slip casting, which allowed for the casting of regular rectangular bricks.

But after issues with making casting hollow bricks work, as well as the cracking of the bricks during firing in the kiln, the work of another student in the group inspired [Joe] to try a different approach. The result was a very uniquely shaped ‘brick’ that, when assembled into a wall, forms three Helmholtz resonators: inside it, as well as two within the space with other bricks. During trials, the bricks showed similar sound-deadening performance as foam and wood. He also made the shape available on Thingiverse, if you want to try printing or casting it yourself.

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Books You Should Read: David Macaulay’s Architecture Series

September 21, 2023 by Dan Maloney 31 Comments

For a lot of us, there’s a bright line separating the books we enjoyed as children from the “real” books of our more mature years. We all eventually age out of the thin, brightly illustrated picture books we enjoyed in our youth, replacing them with thicker, wordier volumes with fewer and fewer illustrations, until they become so dense with information that footnotes and appendices are needed to convey all the information, and a well-written index is a vital necessity to make use of any of it.

Such books seem like a lot less fun than kids’ books, and they probably are, but most of us adjust to the change and accept the fact that the children’s section of the library doesn’t hold much that’ll interest us anymore. But not all the books that get a “JUV” label on their spines are created equal. Some are far more than picture books, even if the pictures are the main attraction. The books of British-born American author David Macaulay come to mind, particularly the books comprising his Architecture Series.

Macaulay’s books were enormously influential in developing my engineering sensibilities, and are still a pleasure to thumb through these many years later. I still learn something about the history of construction and engineering when I pull one of these books off the shelf, which makes them Books You Should Read.

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Debian Officially Adds RISC-V Support

July 25, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 21 Comments

As time goes on, more and more computer manufacturers are moving towards the ARM architecture and away from the bloated and outdated x86 instruction set. Apple is the most prominent producer to take this step, but plenty others are using ARM for its flexibility and efficiency. The only problem with ARM is that it’s licensed, so if you want to go even further down the open-source path the RISC-V instruction set is the next logical step. Now at least one mainline Linux distribution will officially support this architecture.

While Debian did have some support for RISC-V before this as a Debian port, which was not officially part of Debian. However, the official support will begin with the release of Debian 13, which is currently in the testing phase and hasn’t seen a stable release yet. To that end, the current state of this official version is extremely limited, being described as “almost empty” but with planned support for an initial 90 packages in the coming days. Most users working on a RISC-V platform will most likely to continue to use their Debian ports version.

It might be a little while before the RISC-V version is as full-featured as the ARM or x86 versions of this Linux distribution, but we are happy to see it move in this direction at all. And don’t think that RISC-V is limited to embedded systems or otherwise limited computing platforms, either. We’ve seen full Linux desktops with RISC-V processors since at least 2019.

Hackaday Links: June 18, 2023

June 18, 2023 by Dan Maloney 19 Comments

Will it or won’t it? That’s the question much on the minds of astronomers, astrophysicists, and the astro-adjacent this week as Betelgeuse continued its pattern of mysterious behavior that might portend a supernova sometime soon. You’ll recall that the red giant star in the constellation Orion went through a “great dimming” event back in 2019, where its brightness dipped to 60% of its normal intensity. That was taken as a sign that perhaps the star was getting ready to explode — or rather, that the light from whatever happened to the star 548 years ago finally reached us — and was much anticipated by skywatchers, yours truly included. As it turned out, the dimming was likely caused by Betelgeuse belching forth an immense plume of dust, temporarily obscuring our view of its light. Disappointing.

Those who gave up on the hope of seeing a supernova might have done so too fast, though, because now, the star seems to be swinging the other way and brightening. It briefly became the brightest star in Orion, nearly outshining nearby Sirius, the brightest star in the sky. So what does all this on-again, off-again business mean? According to Dr. Becky, a new study — not yet peer-reviewed, so proceed with caution — suggests that the star could go supernova in the next few decades. The evidence for this is completely unrelated to the great dimming event, but by analyzing the star’s long history of variable brightness. The data suggest that Betelgeuse has entered the carbon fusion phase of its life, a period that only lasts on the scale of a hundred years for a star that size. So we could be in for the ultimate fireworks show, which would leave us with a star brighter than the full moon that’s visible even in daylight. And who doesn’t want to see something like that?

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