Hardware

A collection of references, FAQs, documentation and other random things hardware related.

Sun


NeXT


Transputer

The Transputer is a very cool idea -- a moderately powerful yet inexpensive CPU with dedicated communications devices on chip. You connect many of these together to form a huge parallel system. If you really want massively parallel a Transputer is the way to go. Unfortunately, INMOS spent too much time on the latest and greatest Transputer, and it died off for lack of consumption. This is a great loss, for the idea is sound.

At one point in time Atari (yes Atari) made a Transputer workstation, using a Atari ST in a compact board format running as a front end to a expandable set of Transputers. It also had some high end Atari graphics system to run any output on. Way cool -- Transputer for the desktop -- but it fizzled too.


Calculators


DEC

With Alpha split off from DEC a bit, this category also includes people who make Alpha boxes.


IBM


MicroProcessors


MicroControlers


Miscellaneous


Apple


MIPS


Intel PC


Processors


Fixed & Floating Point Math

Floating point math has a distinct tie-in between hardware and software support. While some of this is software, it replicates what most FP chips implement.

I need to track down some info on PDP-11, VAX, and IBM-370 floating point formats. Each of the formats has its own benefits and downsides.


Dinosaurs

There has been lots of neat computing hardware produced. Some of it died. Some was successful, but progress relegated it to a note in history. This section is a catch-all of those systems

Busses and Interconnects


Atari 8-bit computers


Palm Platform


Building Computers and Devices


Components to Interface With the Physical World


Routers and Terminal Servers


Networking


SCSI


Emulators


Storage Devices


History, Applications, and Research


Printers


Tube-Based Computation

For all you history buffs out there ...

Armament and Ordinance

The Marquis De Sade said it all...

Oh, what action as voluptuous as destruction!
There is no Esctasy like the one we taste --
When we give ourselves over to this divine infamy!"

The parenthsized comments are the projectile scale.


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Last Modified: Sun May 7 09:40:43 CDT 2023
bolo (Josef Burger) <bolo@cs.wisc.edu>