A couple years ago, Lenovo announced its plans to build a "retro" ThinkPad that would resurrect design elements of ThinkPads past as an homage to the brand's long history.
That ThinkPad is now real. Check out the ThinkPad 25, sold to commemorate 25 years of ThinkPads.
I'm just going to leave this here for you lovely ThinkPad people. This isn't for me, but I'm not here to ruin your party.
Do clean up after yourselves.
If you're a demanding computer user, sometimes your 13-inch Ultrabook laptop just won't quite cut it. For those looking for a little more computing power, HP's new Z8 workstation could be just the answer. The latest iteration of HP's desktop workstations packs in a pair of Intel Skylake-SP processors, topping out with twinned Xeon Platinum 8180 chips: 28 cores/56 threads and 38.5MB cache each running at 2.5-3.8GHz, along with support for up to 1.5TB RAM.
Next year, you'll be able to go higher still with the 8180M processors; same core count and speeds, but doubling the total memory capacity to 3TB, as long as you want to fill the machine's 24 RAM slots.
Those processors and memory can be combined with up to three Nvidia Quadro P6000 GPUs or AMD Radeon Pro WX 9100 parts if you prefer that team. The hefty desktop systems have four internal drive bays, two external (and a third external for an optical drive), and nine PCIe slots. Storage options include up to 4TB of PCIe-mounted SSD, and 48TB of spinning disks. A range of gigabit and 10 gigabit Ethernet adaptors are available; the machines also support 802.11a/b/g/n/ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.2. Thunderbolt 3 is available with an add-in card.
This is one hell of a beast of a machine, and something most of us will never have the pleasure to use. That being said - I've always been fascinated by these professional workstations, and the HP ones in particular. Current models are obviously way out of my price range, but older models - such as a model from the Z800 range - are more attainable.
This paper is a gentle but rigorous introduction to quantum computing intended for computer scientists. Starting from a small set of assumptions on the behavior of quantum computing devices, we analyze their main characteristics, stressing the differences with classical computers, and finally describe two well-known algorithms (Simon's algorithm and Grover's algorithm) using the formalism developed in previous sections. This paper does not touch on the physics of the devices, and therefore does not require any notion of quantum mechanics.
Some light reading before bedtime.
We take you through a demo of our restored Xerox Alto. We go through the Neptune file browser, the Bravo text editor, the Draw and SIL programs, network booting, ftp, telnet, Smalltalk, some games and new programs we have made for the Alto.
A great video showing off how the Alto - the precursor to the Star, the mother of all graphical user interfaces we still use today on our desktops and phones - works.
Several years ago, we published a round-up of thermal pastes that started with Thermal Paste Comparison, Part One: Applying Grease And More and concluded with Thermal Paste Comparison, Part Two: 39 Products Get Tested. Since it's so hot outside (at least in our U.S. labs), we're trying to cool so many new CPUs and GPUs, and readers keep asking for it, we decided to combine and update those stories, adding a range of new thermal pastes and pads.
Thermal paste and how to apply it are probably more divisive than anything else in technology. So many different methods, old wives' tales, folklore, and god knows what else.
Ben Eater has built his own 8-bit computer, and documented the process.
I built a programmable 8-bit computer from scratch on breadboards using only simple logic gates. I documented the whole project in a series of YouTube videos and on this web site.
It's time to announce the upcoming new "Ultimate-64" board!
In order to sustain the love for the Commodore 64, with failing machines, power supplies and flaky old connectors, I proudly present a new main board for your beloved C64 case:
What is it?! Â This board is a hardware implementation (FPGA) of the entire C64, and it includes the Ultimate-II+ as well. Â An ALL IN ONE solution!
It will be produced in small batches, and the creator hopes to be able to sell it for around 200 dollars. That's a pretty great price to give a C64 a lease on life.
Now this is a real treat - over the past few years, Christopher Masto has been building (and where possible, selling) a PDP-8 replica called the PiDP-8/I. As you may have guessed from the name, the core of the PiDP-8/I is a Raspberry Pi, complemented by a replica PDP-8 front panel and case.
From a hardware perspective, the PiDP is just a frontpanel for a Raspberry PI. In the hardware section below, the technical details of the front panel are explained. In fact, the front panel could just as easily be driven by any microcontroller, it only lights the leds and scans the switch positions.
From a software perspective, the PiDP is just a Raspberry Pi, running Raspbian, which automatically logs in to the SimH emulator. SimH is modified to drive the front panel - meaning it has instructions added to reflect the state of the PDP-8 CPU registers through the leds, and responds to the switch settings.
The PiDP is fully open source, so you can download the schematics, design files, and software and build it yourself from scratch. You can also order a kit from Christopher Masto for $145, or pay an additional $170 for an assembled version (but isn't building half the fun?).
He has a few great videos of the PiDP up on his YouTube channel, including a 90 minute build video and a tour and demo video.
Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to learn how to use the Alto's bitmapped display, not make the fastest Mandelbrot set, so I wasn't concerned that this 1970s computer took so long to run. Even so, readers had detailed suggestions form performance improvements, so I figured I should test out these ideas. The results were much better than I expected, dropping the execution time from 1 hour to 9 minutes.
Articles like this are very satisfying to post, because we can all agree this is just plain awesome, no ifs or buts.
Charles P. Thacker ("Chuck" to those who knew him), who helped pioneer many aspects of the personal computer, and who was awarded the 2009 ACM A.M. Turing Award in recognition of his pioneering design and realization of the first modern personal computer, and for his contributions to Ethernet and the tablet computer, died Monday, June 12, at the age of 74, after a brief illness.
Thacker spent the 1970s and 1980s at PARC. During this period, he served as leader of the project that developed the Xerox Alto personal computer system, the first computer designed from the ground up to support an operating system based on a graphical user interface. The hardware of the Alto, introduced in 1973, was designed mostly by Thacker, with Lampson developing its software.
It's hard to put into words how much this man - and his peers and team at Xerox - contributed to the world of computing. What an incredible genius to lose.
Thank you for your immeasurable contributions, good sir.
A dis-integrated circuit project to make a complete, working transistor-scale replica of the classic MOS 6502 microprocessor.
This is sorcery - and art.
Back when this machine was just a crowdfunding project, we got a few submissions about it. Since we generally do not link to crowdfunding projects before they're, you know, actually available products (for obvious reasons), I never did anything with them. Now, though, the GPD Pocket is out and about, and it seems to be a pretty amazing tiny laptop we really have to talk about, because it's adorable and remarkably capable.
It's an all-aluminium Windows 10/Linux laptop with a 7" 1920x1200 IPS display with 323 ppi, the top-of-the-line Intel Atom x7-Z8750 1.6Ghz quad-core processor, 8GB RAM, Intel HD Graphics 405, and a 128GB SSD. It has a chicklet-style keyboard, a little nub mouse pointer, and can be ordered with either Linux or Windows. It has decent battery life too - they claim 12 hours. According to reviews, it seems to be ticking all the right boxes, making it an actually decent product to buy. IT's $469 on IndieGoGo right now, and the retail price will be $599.
I've always wanted such a tiny laptop, but most of the time they were ugly plastic pieces of garbage that barely got by. This seems to be the first one that isn't actually a bad product (save for the terrible product descriptions on their website), and I'm definitely intrigued. Is there a market for machines like this?
JEDEC DDR5 memory will offer improved performance with greater power efficiency as compared to previous generation DRAM technologies. As planned, DDR5 will provide double the bandwidth and density over DDR4, along with delivering improved channel efficiency. These enhancements, combined with a more user-friendly interface for server and client platforms, will enable high performance and improved power management in a wide variety of applications.
I'm still using DDR3, planning a PC upgrade which will include DDR4, and DDR5 is already in the pipeline.
This was freaky. When you owned any 8-bit computer, you became intimately familiar with its colour scheme. This simple photograph blew my mind. That blue colour just wasn't possible.
According to the caption, by presenting two colours to the eye and alternating them quickly enough, a whole new colour emerged. What would this new, secret colour look like on your crappy early-90s CRT television? The screenshot was only a hint. Would it glow? Would it flicker?
Twenty-six years later, I found out the answer.
This article is all about colour switching on the Commodore 64. There are interactive examples to play with below. I haven't found anything else on the topic, so it's possible this is the only resource on the subject.It's amazing what talented programmers can eke out of old 8bit machines.
Okay so I'm using this perfectly fine article as an excuse to bring something up, so bear with me here.
If you haven't been paying attention to the PC world lately, you might not have noticed that the lowly PC has seen a bit of a resurgence, with interesting designs and unique concepts. We saw this come to bear at CES just a couple of months ago, where PC makers such as Dell, Lenovo, and HP all trotted out interesting laptop designs.
But the laptop isn't the only PC that's seen a design-focused revival. The lowly desktop PC has transformed from a boring beige or black box into a centerpiece of a modern desk space. An all-in-one computer in 2017 is both functional as a computer and beautiful to appreciate as a piece of design.
This is only slightly related, but it's something that has been bugging me for years, and since I was confronted with it again this past weekend, I might as well get it out of my system: why is nobody innovating anymore in the field of building your own computer? So many aspects of building your own computer are completely crazy when you think about it, and it seems like nobody is really doing anything to fix them.
For instance, why haven't we come up with a way to increase the power you can draw from a PCI-E slot, so that graphics cards don't have to be plugged into the PSU directly with unwieldy power cables, with connectors in the most boneheaded location on the graphics card?
Why are we still using those horrible internal 9/10-pin connectors for USB, the front panel, audio, and so on? These are absolutely dreadful connectors, spread out all over the motherboard in illogical places forcing you to route cabling in unnatural ways, and the pins can easily bend. This is terrible 80s technology that we should've fixed by now.
And the most idiotic connector of them all, which is huge, stiff, almost impossible to plug in, remove, or route properly: the ATX power plug from the PSU to the motherboard. This thing is probably one of the worst connectors you can possibly find inside any computer, and the slot on the motherboard is in an incredibly illogical place considering most case layouts. To make matters worse, the CPU power connector sits at the top-left (usually) of the motherboard, so that's another unwieldy connector and cable with an unnatural route that you have to deal with. It's just terrible.
I like the inside of my computer to look as neat and tidy as possible - not only because it looks nice and is easier to clean, but also because it improves airflow, something quite important with today's processors and graphics cards. However, aging standards with terrible designs and horrible usability that wouldn't look out of place in a 1960s mainframe make that quite the challenge.
We've seen some minor improvements already these past ten years or so, with the advent of modular PSUs and the death of the dreadfully terrible IDE cables and Molex connectors, but more work is definitely needed. We need a replacement for the aging ATX standard, which delivers enough power to the motherboard for the board itself, video cards, and the processors and fans, through a single cable with a modern, easy-to-use connector. It'd be great if a replacement for SATA could also carry power, so that we no longer need to route individual power cables to our hard drives. We need to get rid of 9/10-pin connectors for things like USB and the front panel, and replace them with easy-to-use USB-like connectors.
And last but certainly not least: put all of these things in locations that make sense for the vast majority of cases in use today, so we can reduce the length of cables, save money in the process, and end up with cleaner, easier-to-use computers.
Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, case makers, Microsoft, and whomever else is involved here - sit around a damn table for once, and hash this stuff out. ATX is outdated garbage, and needs a modern replacement. ATX was introduced in 1995 - do you still want to use Windows 95? OS/2 Warp? Version 1.2.0 of the Linux kernel? System 7.5.1? Floppies? CRTs? Of course you don't!
Then why the hell are we still using ATX?
The problem with laptops has, at least in recent years, been one of expandability. Once you buy a machine, you’re generally stuck with it, unless you’re willing to take it apart with repairs that have more in common with surgery than mechanics.
Part of this has to do with the complexity of our modern machines, but a bigger part is the fact that, simply, upgradability has become less of a concern for manufacturers.
But there was a time when laptop upgrades were a big deal - and that time was the 90s.
Here's the story of PCMCIA, an acronym only a 90s laptop owner could love.
I used a PCMCIA network card on my BeOS laptop (in 2001 or so), since the on-board network chip didn't have a BeOS driver. Good times.
FAP80 is a Z80-based retro computer with a sprinkling of modern twists to make the experience of designing, programming, and debugging this computer as painless and straightforward as possible.
A lot of retro computer projects today are rooted on nostalgia, they tend to use "period correct" components to get the "feelings" right, and the result often ends up on perfboard or self-etched circuit boards, rudimentary video capacity if at all, few I/O ports, and a symphony of 74 series chips.
While there is nothing wrong with that, I wasn't around during the 80s home computer era, so I didn't have the same attachment to how things was done back then. So instead of trying to recreate the "good old days", I made the decision to liberally use modern parts to simplify the design process, as well as making this computer highly flexible and easy to program and use with very little overheads.
The creator's blog has more detailed information about the project.
That's where the company's new software tool Qbsolv comes in. Qbsolv is designed to help developers program D-Wave machines without needing a background in quantum physics. A few of D-Wave's partners are already using the tool, but today the company released Qbsolv as open source, meaning anyone will be able to freely share and modify the software.
"Not everyone in the computer science community realizes the potential impact of quantum computing," says Fred Glover, a mathematician at the University of Colorado, Boulder who has been working with Qbsolv. "Qbsolv offers a tool that can make this impact graphically visible, by getting researchers and practitioners involved in charting the future directions of quantum computing developments."
I figured, for this and future posts I have planned about MSX, that I wanted an MSX font face. I browsed the web a bit for one and found nothing that I liked. So decided to create one.
I'm pretty sure I'll be violating someone's copyright here, because I won't be making an MSX-inspired 8-bit looking font. I am going to build THE EXACT FONT that the MSX 1.0 I grew up with had. I just hope the copyright owner will let this pass, given how "valuable" this font is nowadays and that I won't be making a cent from this. If he or she is not OK, though, I'll comply with their request.
I used an MSX a lot when I was a kid. Great machine for BASIC.
The FireBee is a new Atari-compatible computer. Ataris and Atari-Clones are special computers with their own hard & software. They aren't PC's, Mac's nor Amiga compatible.
A FireBee is similar to an Atari Falcon and works very much like that. It will run most of the Atari compatible software that would run on a Falcon. Different to older Ataris and their clones, the FireBee is a modern computer that supports almost everything you'd expect from a today's machine, like USB ports, Ethernet, DVI-I monitor connector, SD-card reader and more.
This brand-new Atari compatible is not cheap, but much like the current Amiga computers, if you're worried about the price, you're probably not the intended audience. Note that even though the order page says "pre-order", I think that's a typo - you can order them directly from the Swiss company that makes them, too.
I love that people and companies are passionate enough to keep developing, building, and selling machines like this - it's a vital effort to keep platforms alive well into the future.