If you’ve ever been configuring a router or other network device and noticed that you can set up IPv4 and IPv6, you might have wondered what happened to IPv5. Well, thanks to [Navek], you don’t have to wonder anymore. Just watch the video below. We will warn you of two things. First, the video takes […]
Movies mirror the time they were made. [ErnieTech] asserts that we can see what people thought about computers back in 1957 by watching the classic Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie “Desk Set.” What’s more, he thinks this might be the first movie appearance of a human-like computer. On a side note, in the UK this movie […]
[Ken Shirriff] has been sharing a really low-level look at Intel’s Pentium (1993) processor. The Pentium’s architecture was highly innovative in many ways, and one of [Ken]’s most recent discoveries is that it contains a complex circuit — containing around 9,000 transistors — whose sole purpose is to multiply specifically by three. Why does such […]
There was a time when the line between typewriters and word processing software was a bit fuzzy. [Poking Technology] found a Xerox 6040 which can’t decide what it is. It looks like a typewriter but has a monitor and a floppy drive, along with some extra buttons. You can watch him tear it down in […]
Inspired by the N64: Recompiled project, XenonRecomp does something similar, except for the PowerPC-equipped Microsoft Xbox 360 game console. Based around the triple-core IBM CPU codenamed ‘Xenon‘, the Xbox 360 was released in 2005 and generally quite successful over its lifespan despite its Red Ring of Death issues. Although the current Xbox Series X supports […]
If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun Microsystems planned for it in the mid-1990s. Back then it was key to a bright coffee-themed future of write-once-run-anywhere software, and aside from your web browser using it to run applications, your computer would be […]
Talking computers are nothing these days. But in the old days, a computer that could speak was quite the novelty. Many computers from the 1970s and 1980s used an AY-3-8910 chip and [InazumaDenki] has been playing with one of these venerable chips. You can see (and hear) the results in the video below. The chip […]
Unless you handle the backups for a large corporation, bank, or government entity, you likely haven’t stored much data to tape recently. But magnetic storage used to be fairly mainstream back in the 1980s for all kinds of computer programs. Plenty of computers used standard cassette tapes for this too but you couldn’t just copy […]
Coming straight to the point: [Ron Hinton] is significantly braver than we are. Or maybe he was just in a worse situation. His historic Acer K385s laptop suffered what we learned is called vinegar syndrome, which is a breakdown in the polarizers that make the LCD work. So he bit the bullet and decided to […]
Did you know that the land of flat-pack furniture and Saab automobiles played a serious role in the development of minicomputers, the forerunners of our home computers? If not, read on for a bit of history. You can also go ahead and watch the video below, which tells it all with a ton of dug […]