Showing posts with label computer history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label computer history. Show all posts
Monday, September 28, 2026

This Guy Designed His Own Microprocessor Chip -- But Is This REALLY Design?

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First, hats off to this fellow.  He deserves a lot of credit for even trying this.   But... I think this shows how DIFFERENT designging thes...
Sunday, September 13, 2026

Demystification! Not Magic! How Claude and Dean made the KK4DAS -- N2CQR Video (Be Sure to Read the Report Until the End!)

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  Many have asked how the video was made.  Dean and Claude (but not Claude Shannon! ) explain here:  https://kk4das.blogspot.com/2026/09/how...
Friday, September 11, 2026

Claude Makes a Video About N2CQR calling KK4DAS

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Quick!  Before Claude turns us all into paper clips!    I guess this is part of a series.  First we had Notebook LLM making a podcast about ...
7 comments:

Why Chip Circuits Can Never be Truly Homebrew: ASML's Amazing Photolithography -- Please Comment

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  As I watched this video, I had many thoughts.   Here are some of them:  1)  The complexity of the ASML machine is a reminder of how far IC...
6 comments:
Friday, June 26, 2026

100 Billion Transistors on One Small Chip -- No Room for Homebrew!

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https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-06-25-ibm-debuts-worlds-first-sub-1-nanometer-chip-technology FCC Amateur Radio Exam Question:  Draw the schem...
Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Early Hacking with an IMSAI 8080 -- "War Games" (1983) Scene with Matthew Broderick and Ally Sheedy

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Some computer history here, and it is old enough (1983) to fit into the SolderSmoke theme.  Plus it appears that the young fellow has a shac...
Friday, January 16, 2026

MIT Technology Review on Why AI LLMs are So Strange and So Alien

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Until recently, I thought that the AI LLMs were just sort of fancy, souped-up search engines.  Google on steroids.   But then they started g...
3 comments:
Tuesday, January 13, 2026

Why is it that AI-provided electronic circuits often don't work in the real world?

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Like many, I have turned to AI for circuit ideas.  And like many, I have been surprised by how many of these ideas just don't work.  I h...
19 comments:
Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Internet Archive / Wayback Machine in an Old Church in San Francisco

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  Three cheers for the Internet Archive!  Among its millions or trillions of things saved, there is the SolderSmoke podcast and blog.   Chec...
5 comments:
Friday, October 3, 2025

More Silicon Valley -- Apple, Microsoft, and IBM (video)

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  More interesting computer history.   -- Visicalc and importance of spread sheets. (I remember when I first learned to use one).  -- Amazin...

Silicon Valley -- The Hippies who Built the First PC (full video)

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Computers are not really my thing, but the discussion of California culture and how it led to the home computer revolution is very interesti...
Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Homebrewing a Quantum Computer

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Ok, now for something completely different, and something that might help us shake off that Ludite moniker.  I've seen lots of videos th...
Wednesday, May 14, 2025

The Computer Hardware of the Apollo Program

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Watching this, it seems like a miracle that we made it to the moon.  Some of this construction is downright scary.  Sometimes soldering is n...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 10, 2025

The History of MOSFETs -- Let us Remember the 40673. The IRF510. And others...

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Lots of great history explained in this video.  I found myself thinking about our beloved 40673 dual gate MOSFET:  https://hackaday.com/2016...
4 comments:
Sunday, March 16, 2025

CuriousMarc Gets an Apollo DSKY Running. FPGA AGC Computer. Rope Memory.

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I really liked this video.  So much amazing wizardry in it.  Just the FPGA Apollo AGC simulator that Mike whipped up.  Wow.  Kudos!   Thei...
Tuesday, October 8, 2024

The Transistor that Changed the World -- the MOSFET

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Another great video from Asianometry.   My only quibble is that it kind of left unclear the differences between JFETs and MOSFETs.  After al...
2 comments:
Saturday, September 7, 2024

The Surprising Difficulty of Analog Circuit Chip Design -- AI to the Rescue?

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNypq1XuZRo Really interesting.  Why the design of the analog portions of chips is so much harder than t...
1 comment:
Sunday, May 26, 2024

A Really Cool Homebrew Computer

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Wow, very cool.  On Hack-A-Day this morning: https://hackaday.com/2024/05/26/homebrew-computer-from-the-ground-up/ It caught my eye because ...
1 comment:
Monday, February 5, 2024

"The Soul of a New Machine" -- Re-reading the Classic Book by Tracy Kidder

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This book is especially important to the SolderSmoke community because its title has led to one of the most important concepts in our commun...
6 comments:
Monday, January 29, 2024

The System Source Museum (Computers, Maryland)

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Thanks to my friend Bob KD4EBM for alerting me to this.  Bob provides some very useful background:  https://museum.syssrc.com/ (Just north o...
3 comments: