Hardware Archive

A few weeks ago, an interesting question cropped up: How fast is a PS/2 keyboard? That is to say, how quickly can it send scan codes (bytes) to the keyboard controller?

One might also ask, does it really matter? Sure enough, it does. As it turns out, the Borland Turbo Pascal 6.0 run-time, and probably a few related versions, handle keyboard input in a rather unorthodox way. The run-time installs its own INT 9/IRQ 1 handler (keyboard interrupt) which reads port 60h (keyboard data) and then chains to the original INT 9 handler… which reads port 60h again, expecting to read the same value.

That is a completely crazy approach, unless there is a solid guarantee that the keyboard can’t send a new byte of data before port 60h is read the second time. The two reads are done more or less back to back, with interrupts disabled, so much time cannot elapse between the two. But there will be some period of time where the keyboard might send further data. So, how quickly can a keyboard do that?

The BASIC Engine is a very low-cost single-board home computer with advanced 2D color graphics and sound capabilities, roughly comparable to late-1980s or early-1990s computers and video game consoles. It can be built at home without special skills or tools and using readily available components for under 10 Euros in parts, or mass-produced for even less.

But Popular Electronics readers were introduced to something in the January 1975 issue that they had never encountered before. Below a heading that read "PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH", the magazine's cover showed a large gray and black box whose front panel bore a complicated array of lights and toggles. This was the Altair 8800, the "world's first minicomputer kit to rival commercial models", available for under $400. Though advertised as a "minicomputer", the Altair would actually be the first commercially successful member of a new class of computers, first known as "microcomputers" and then eventually as PCs. The Altair was small enough and cheap enough that the average family could have one at home. Its appearance in Popular Electronics magazine meant that, as Salsberg wrote in that issue, "the home computer age is here - finally".

Pull a USB flash drive out of your Mac without first clicking to eject it, and you'll get a stern, shameful warning: "Disk Not Ejected Properly."

But do you really need to eject a thumb drive the right way?

Probably not. Just wait for it to finish copying your data, give it a few seconds, then yank. To be on the cautious side, be more conservative with external hard drives, especially the old ones that actually spin.

That's not the official procedure, nor the most conservative approach. And in a worst-case scenario, you risk corrupting a file or - even more unlikely - the entire storage device.

The PC market has seen its first growth quarter in six years, according to research firm Gartner. The streak is over: Gartner found PC shipments were up globally in Q2 2018, the first quarter of year-over-year global PC shipment growth since the first quarter of 2012.

Gartner estimates that worldwide PC shipments grew 1.4 percent to 62.1 million units in Q2 2018. The top five vendors were Lenovo, HP, Dell, Apple, and Acer. Lenovo in particular saw big gains (its highest growth rate since the first quarter of 2015), although that's largely due in part to the inclusion of units from its joint venture with Fujitsu.

Arm has taken offline its website attacking rival processor architecture RISC-V within days of it going live - after its own staff objected to the underhand tactic.

The site - riscv-basics.com - was created at the end of June, and attempted to smear open-source RISC-V, listing five reasons why Arm cores are a better choice over its competitor's designs. However, the stunt backfired, with folks in the tech industry, and within the company's own ranks, slamming the site as a cheap shot and an attack on open source.

Surviving on its remaining video-game inventory, the new company went to work developing Tramiel's new 16-bit computer. Based on the same Motorola 68000 processor used in the Apple Macintosh, the Atari ST (the ST apparently standing for "sixteen/thirty-two" although some have speculated it stood for "Sam Tramiel" after Jack's son), was designed to be attractive to a wide variety of computer users. Like the Commodore 64, the ST could be plugged into a television for casual video-gaming, but additionally it could use a colour or monochrome monitor - the latter of which featuring a higher resolution than the Macintosh, an appeal to those in the then-emerging world of desktop publishing. It also came standard with MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) ports for controlling synthesisers, making it attractive to musicians.

In January 1981, a handful of semiconductor engineers at MOS Technology in West Chester, Pa., a subsidiary of Commodore International Ltd., began designing a graphics chip and sound chip to sell to whoever wanted to make "the world's best video game". In January 1982, a home computer incorporating those chips was introduced at the Winter Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Nev. By using in-house integrated-circuit-fabrication facilities for prototyping, the engineers had cut design time for each chip to less than nine months, and they had designed and built five prototype computers for the show in less than five weeks. What surprised the rest of the home-computer industry the most, however, was the introductory price of the Commodore 64: $595 for a unit incorporating a keyboard, a central processor, the graphics and sound chips, and 64 kilobytes of memory instead of the 16 or 32 that were considered the norm.

Last week, the US Department of Energy and IBM unveiled Summit, America's latest supercomputer, which is expected to bring the title of the world's most powerful computer back to America from China, which currently holds the mantle with its Sunway TaihuLight supercomputer.

With a peak performance of 200 petaflops, or 200,000 trillion calculations per second, Summit more than doubles the top speeds of TaihuLight, which can reach 93 petaflops. Summit is also capable of over 3 billion billion mixed precision calculations per second, or 3.3 exaops, and more than 10 petabytes of memory, which has allowed researchers to run the world's first exascale scientific calculation.

The $200 million supercomputer is an IBM AC922 system utilizing 4,608 compute servers containing two 22-core IBM Power9 processors and six Nvidia Tesla V100 graphics processing unit accelerators each. Summit is also (relatively) energy-efficient, drawing just 13 megawatts of power, compared to the 15 megawatts TaihuLight pulls in.

USB Type-C was billed as the solution for all our future cable needs, unifying power and data delivery with display and audio connectivity, and ushering in an age of the one-size-fits-all cable. Unfortunately for those already invested in the USB Type-C ecosystem, which is anyone who has bought a flagship phone in the past couple of years, the standard has probably failed to live up to the promises.

It's a Monday night in Bristol in July 1983. Your parents are downstairs watching Coronation Street while you skulk in your bedroom under the pretence of doing homework. In reality, you're hunched over your cassette recorder, fingers hovering over the buttons in feverish anticipation. A quiver of excitement runs through you as a voice from the radio announces: "and now the moment you've all been waiting for..." There's a satisfying clunk as you press down on play and record simultaneously, and moments later the room is filled with strange metallic squawks and crackles. "SCREEEEEEEEEEE..."

You're listening to the Datarama show on Radio West and partaking in the UK's first attempt to send a computer program over local radio. Joe Tozer, who co-hosted the show, recalls how it all began: "I think it was just one of those 'ping!' moments when you realise that the home computer program is just audio on a cassette, so why not transmit it over air? It just seemed a cool idea."

Alexa for PCs, announced earlier this year, brings the cloud-based voice service to Windows 10 computers. Today, we introduce Alexa for PC solutions from Original Design Manufacturers (ODMs). Customers use PCs every day for business and entertainment. We believe voice is the next major disruption in the PC category, which is an important part of our "Alexa Everywhere" vision.

Four Windows 10 PCs have been added to our portfolio of qualified ODM solutions integrated with Alexa: An all-in-one desktop from Wistron, and convertible notebooks from Compal, Quanta, and Wistron. All of these pre-tested, final-product designs have been built for a far-field Alexa experience, with Intel CPUs, drivers, wake word engine, and microphone arrays.

The Cortex A76 presents itself a solid generational improvement for Arm. We've been waiting on a larger CPU microarchitecture for several years now, and while the A76 isn't quite a performance monster to compete with Apple's cores, it shows how important it is to have a balanced microarchitecture. This year all eyes were on Samsung and the M3 core, and unfortunately the performance increase came at a great cost of power and efficiency which ended up making the end-product rather uncompetitive. The A76 drives performance up but on every step of the way it still deeply focused on power efficiency which means we'll get to see the best of both worlds in end products.

In general Arm promises a 35% performance improvement which is a significant generational uplift. Together with the fact that the A76 is targeted to be employed in 7nm designs is also a boost to the projected product.

There are many products that cross my desk for review, and very few of those products surprise me. I've been doing this for long enough that I can generally guess how a device is going to perform or work before it even gets to me.

Huawei's new MateBook X Pro is an exception. Even though the MateBook X Pro has a deep bench of specs and an eye-catching design, Huawei is not exactly an established brand in the laptop world. Prior Huawei laptops weren't great, either: they had poor battery life, not enough power, bad design, frustrating trackpads, and were generally not worth considering.

Fortunately, the MateBook X Pro has completely and thoroughly exceeded my expectations. While it is not a perfect laptop and it has a couple of faults that will stop some from considering it, it is still the best laptop I've used all year. That makes it my new recommendation as the productivity and entertainment laptop to buy right now.