Hardware Archive

When was the last time that you used a floppy disk? While still used as the save icon in modern software packages like Microsoft's Office suite, it's unusual to see one out in the wild. Given that a typical floppy disk offers up a minuscule 1.44MB of space - not even enough to house a three-minute pop song in MP3 format - there's seemingly no reason for these disks to stay in circulation.

But while the average user might not have any cause to use a floppy disk, there are those out there who can't settle for anything else. They're in dire need of the disks, which most manufacturers have stopped producing. The floppy disk might seem like something better left in the 1990s. Instead it's a product that's alive and well in the 21st century.

Yesterday at the Maker Faire in New York, we had a chance to check out the Rephone, a clever little project that comprises a bunch of modules that let you cobble together your own tiny little cell phone. Actually, making a cute little cardboard-encased phone is the least interesting thing aboutt the Rephone kit. The group behind it, Seeed Studio, has made dozens of modules and an SDK that enables you to build out nearly any sort of cellular-based gadget you can imagine. They've strapped it on a dog collar so you can locate your dog (or just call him to come home). They've strapped it to a kite to provide you with real-time telemetry. They've strapped it to a door, a lamp, and (uh), a table.

And Apple's solution to this conundrum is very neat: even with a blank hard disk, the system firmware can connect to Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet, go online, and download the operating system directly from Apple. You can do a bare metal restore with nothing more than an Internet connection.

The post-PC era is a term that was made popular by Apple at its introduction of the iPad in 2010, and one that a lot of people took to mean the PC will eventually die and tablets and smartphones will take its place. The PC isn't exactly healthy right now, but it's also nowhere near death, no matter how many stories try to exaggerate its continued decline.

Like all modern processors the Mega-processor is built from transistors. It's just that instead of using teeny-weeny ones integrated on a silicon chip it uses discrete individual ones like those below. Thousands of them. And loads of LEDs.

One of the first computers in the world, EDSAC is being rebuilt at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Andrew Herbert takes us on a walk around inside the computer.

Moscow Center of SPARC Technologies (MCST) has announced it's now taking orders for its Russian-made microprocessors from domestic computer and server manufacturers. The chip, called Elbrus-4C, was fully designed and developed in MCST's Moscow labs. It's claimed to be the most high-tech processor ever built in Russia, and is comparable with Intel Corp's Core i3 and Intel Core i5 processors.

The first microprocessor, the TMX 1795, had the same architecture as the 8008 but was built months before the 8008. Never sold commercially, this Texas Instruments processor is now almost forgotten even though it had a huge impact on the computer industry. In this article, I present the surprising history of the TMX 1795 in detail, look at other early processors, and explain why the TMX 1795 should be considered the first microprocessor.

The Vintage Computer Festival East is a once-a-year museum exhibit in Wall, New Jersey that shows off vacuum tube and transistor computers from the 60s, 70s, and 80s. While our own John Timmer visited the museum several years ago, we were long overdue to check back on the exhibition. VCF's newest addition made the trip well-worth it.

The incredible piece of big iron you see in the first picture above arrived yesterday. It's a one-of-a-kind analog computer built for MIT, so it doesn't really have a name or model number. Built by George A. Philbrick Researches in 1958, the volunteers at the science center have just taken to calling it "George."

The combined company will have unparalleled innovation capabilities, with Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs and Nokia's FutureWorks, as well as Nokia Technologies, which will stay as a separate entity with a clear focus on licensing and the incubation of new technologies.

As I'm writing this, I'm worried I'm waking up the neighbors. I'm typing these sentences on a mechanical keyboard, one of the odder and more endearing hardware trends in the tech world right now. It's the kind of keyboard everyone used 20 years ago, and that can still be found in some old-school offices that haven't upgraded their IT in a while. You know the keyboards - the ones that have tall keys and emit a sharp, high-pitched click-clack with every keypress.

Most tech nostalgia is misplaced. As much as we pretend to pine for the gadgets of the past, you wouldn't actually want to trade in your iPhone 6 for a Nokia, or sub your Chromebook out for a Commodore 64. But these days, a dedicated group of keyboard connoisseurs is trying to resurrect the mechanical keyboard. There are now a handful of dedicated mechanical keyboard manufacturers, like Code and Rosewill, and an active subreddit exists for mechanical keyboard fans to exchange tips and reviews.

After using one for a week, I finally understand the hobbyist hype. Mechanical keyboards are loud, expensive, clunky, and cool as hell.

The Amiga was stuck in the past way of doing things, thus marking the end of an era as well as the beginning of one. It was the punctuation mark at the end of the wild-and-wooly first decade of the American PC, the last time an American company would dare to release a brand new machine that was completely incompatible with what had come before.