Ken Shirriff's blog

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the Space Shuttle's cargo bay, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments.1 Because Spacelab was a European project, it used a French-built minicomputer, the Mitra 125 MS,2 rather than the

In 1948, IBM introduced the 604 Electronic Calculating Punch.

The Space Shuttle's five1 general-purpose computers played a critical role in each flight: controlling the engines, monitoring thousands of sensors, displaying data to the astronauts, and navigating the Shuttle.

In 1980, Intel released the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor, a chip that could make math up to 100 times faster.

1948 was an interesting time for computing.

In 1980, Intel introduced the 8087 floating-point chip, a co-processor that made floating-point operations up to 100 times faster.

Spacelab was a reusable laboratory that could be carried in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle, providing lab space for astronauts and experiments.

Before GPS, how did aircraft navigate?

The morning of April 12, 1981, 20 years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, the Space Shuttle thundered into the Florida sky.

In the 1980s, if you wanted your IBM PC to run faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip.

In 1978, Intel introduced the 8086 processor, a revolutionary chip that led to the modern x86 architecture.

In the 1980s, if you wanted your computer to do floating-point calculations faster, you could buy the Intel 8087 floating-point coprocessor chip.

Early microprocessors were very slow when operating with floating-point numbers.

I've been studying the standard cell circuitry in the Intel 386 processor recently.

The New York Times recently introduced a new daily puzzle called Pips.

The noted Diné (Navajo) weaver Marilou Schultz recently completed an intricate weaving composed of thick white lines on a black background, punctuated with reddish-orange diamonds.

I was reading the latest issue of the journal Science, and a paper mentioned the compound Cr2Gr2Te6.

I've been reverse-engineering the Intel 386 processor (from 1985), and I've come across some interesting circuits for the chip's input/output (I/O) pins.

Intel released the 386 processor in 1985, the first 32-bit chip in the x86 line.

Have you ever wanted to reverse engineer an analog chip from a die photo?

Back in 2021, a collector friend of ours was visiting a dusty warehouse in search of Apollo-era communications equipment.

During the Apollo flights to the Moon, the astronauts observed the spacecraft's orientation on a special instrument called the FDAI (Flight Director / Attitude Indicator).

In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture.

The groundbreaking Intel 386 processor (1985) was the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture.

mult3 In 1977, Commodore released the PET computer, a quirky home computer that combined the processor, a tiny keyboard, a cassette drive for storage, and a trapezoidal screen in a metal unit.