Hardware
Technology
26 rabbit holes · 13 people exploring
Common starting questions
- Why do Melee players still use CRT TVs?
- Is it legal to write an emulator?
- Did Nintendo almost make the PlayStation?
- How much memory did the Apollo guidance computer have?
- What does rapid trigger actually do?
Rabbit holes
- why people still haul CRTs to Melee tournaments
Melee's competitive play runs on frame-tight tech (wavedashing is an air dodge into the ground that turns into a slide), and most flat screens add enough display lag to throw it off. So CRTs it is. Then Slippi brought rollback netplay and kept the scene going through the pandemic.
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources
- Space Invaders speeds up because the hardware was struggling
Kaito Morimoto · 5 sources
- is emulation actually legal?
Dev Malhotra · 6 sources
- the 1086 Domesday Book is still readable. the 1986 one almost wasn't
For the 900th anniversary of the Domesday Book, the BBC got over a million people (mostly kids) to document Britain in 1986, stored on special LaserDiscs for BBC Micro-based machines. By 2002 the hardware that could read them was getting rare.
Dev Malhotra · 7 sources
- Boston Dynamics retired the hydraulic Atlas
The hydraulic one did parkour and backflips. The 2024 replacement is fully electric, with joints that rotate in ways that are deeply unsettling to watch.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- the PlayStation started as a CD add-on for the Super Nintendo
Sony announced the SNES PlayStation at CES in 1991, and the next day Nintendo announced it was working with Philips instead. Sony went off and built its own console. A surviving prototype turned up years later and sold at auction in 2020 for around $360k.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- Moore's law and the end of Dennard scaling
Pita Taufa · 4 sources
- the IBM Model M still works after 40 years
Buckling springs, a steel backplate, weighs as much as a small dumbbell. People still pull them out of e-waste and they work fine.
Marco Bianchi · 4 sources
- How did Apollo get to the moon with ~4KB of RAM
Kaito Morimoto · 6 sources
- rowhammer: flipping bits by reading memory really fast
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- Stuxnet
A worm that spread via USB sticks, used multiple zero-days, and quietly made uranium centrifuges spin at the wrong speeds while showing operators normal readings.
Vera Lindholm · 6 sources
- hall effect keyboards and rapid trigger
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- master keys are a security hole
Each pin stack in a master-keyed lock has an extra split, so more than one key works, which also means more ways to pick it. Matt Blaze showed you can derive the master key from a single change key.
Ben Adler · 4 sources
- people build working fusion reactors in their garages
A fusor is basically a spherical grid inside a vacuum chamber with a bit of deuterium and tens of kilovolts. It genuinely fuses atoms and you can detect the neutrons. It also uses vastly more power than it makes, which is fine because the point is doing it. Among hobbyists, detecting neutrons is the bar for having actually done it.
Kate Lindqvist · 6 sources
- the Soviets built a ternary computer
Setun used balanced ternary (−1, 0, +1) instead of binary. About 50 were built in the 1950s-60s. Balanced ternary makes negative numbers and rounding really elegant.
Callie Sutherland · 5 sources
- racing the beam: the Atari 2600 had no frame buffer
Ludovica Ferri · 6 sources
- does airplane mode actually matter
Apparently the real reason is a pilot hearing that GSM buzz in their headset, plus a hundred phones screaming for cell towers at altitude. Not that the plane falls out of the sky.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- a cosmic ray might have helped a Mario 64 speedrunner
A runner got teleported upward in Tick Tock Clock in 2013 and nobody could reproduce it. The leading explanation is a single bit flip in Mario's height value. Same thing that happens to satellites and that ECC memory protects servers from.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- EUV lithography vaporizes tin droplets with lasers 50,000 times a second
Molten tin droplets are hit twice by a laser (once to flatten, once to vaporize) to make plasma that emits 13.5 nm light. Everything after that has to be mirrors in a vacuum because EUV is absorbed by nearly everything, including air.
Annika Brandt · 4 sources
- elevators are why skyscrapers work
Steel cables get so heavy past ~500 m that they can barely carry their own weight, so supertall buildings use sky lobbies where you change elevators. Some newer cables are carbon fiber.
Ludovica Ferri · 5 sources
- why almost every advanced chip comes from one company
Started with TSMC, ended up at ASML in the Netherlands, the only company that makes EUV machines. Each one costs north of $150 million and ships in dozens of containers.
Omar Haddad · 6 sources
- an economist built a computer that runs on water
Income, taxes, savings and imports are literally tanks and pipes. You turn valves to change policy and watch the money (colored water) slosh through the economy. He built the first one in a garage in 1949.
Daniela Ruiz · 5 sources
- why USB-A is never the right way up
Bhatt has said making it reversible would have doubled the wires and cost. The superposition joke (you always need three tries) is apparently quantum-mechanically sound.
Dev Malhotra · 4 sources
- how do you build a typewriter for a language with thousands of characters?
The common design was a tray of a couple thousand metal characters with an arm that picked one at a time. Lin Yutang's MingKwai in the 1940s used keys to narrow things down to a handful of candidates you then picked from, which is weirdly close to how phone input and autocomplete work now.
Chidi Eze · 6 sources
- Jeff Hawkins carried a block of wood around to design the Palm Pilot
Before building anything he cut a block of wood to the size he wanted and carried it around, pretending to check his calendar on it in meetings. The Newton tried to read normal handwriting and got mocked for it (Doonesbury, The Simpsons). Palm went the other way: learn a slightly different alphabet in an afternoon, get near-perfect recognition.
Callie Sutherland · 6 sources
- keyboards have a surprising amount of input latency
Dan Luu measured a bunch of keyboards and a lot of expensive 'gaming' boards were slower than cheap ones. Then his computer-latency post: an Apple IIe beat modern machines on keypress-to-screen.
Marco Bianchi · 4 sources