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You are here: Home / Guest Appearance / #361 – An Interview with Ken Shirriff

#361 – An Interview with Ken Shirriff

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Welcome Ken Shirriff from Righto.com!

  • Ken uses a metallugical microscope and the hyugens software package to stitch together the images.
  • Inside fake RAM chips
  • Armour etch will remove the top layer of oxide
  • Analyzing a vintage 8008
  • Mining bitcoin with pencil and paper. Ken made a video of this as well.
  • Mining bitcoin on a Xerox Alto!
  • Xerox Alto , precursor to (all computers, but also the) Xerox Star
  • Alan Kay
  • yCombinator contacted Ken to rebuild theirs.
  • The IBM 1401 demo lab
  • Living computer museum in Seattle
  • Smalltalk –
  • BCPL
  • The 76477 sound chip 
  • Integrated Injection Logic
  • Day 31 of restoration
  • The Alto had the first version of tons of modern computer peripherals:
    • Mouse
    • Laser Printer
    • Ethernet
  • Ken displayed his work at the recent VCF
  • They found a disk with an early version of Voice over IP!
  • Bell Labs discovering big bang (microwave background radiation)
  • Sinclair calculator simulator
  • Ken was inspired by the Visual 6502
  • CuriousMarc is a YouTube channel that followed the Alto rebuild
  • TI Calculator simulator
  • Ken uses lots of patents like this one from TI
  • There are interesting things happening in Mac chargers (and the ripoffs)
  • DS2413 1-Wire switch
  • iPad chargers were interesting as well
  • Sprite_tm talking about FTDI parts
  • Ken also tears down vintage parts like the 555
  • Figured out transistors on die from books, LT Spice
  • Transfluxors – core memory
  • Read more on righto.com or follow Ken on Twitter as @KenShirriff

Comments

  1. Anders Westman says

    September 26, 2017 at 4:38 am

    Great episode!
    One retro chip I’d love to see inside is the old handheld Nintendo Game & Watch games.
    Some say that it is all pure logic, no processor, no code. Just a table and some shift registers.
    I dont know – but would love to know! 🙂

  2. Nicolas Allende says

    September 29, 2017 at 11:31 pm

    Great show

Trackbacks

  1. Year End, 2017 | The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast says:
    December 18, 2017 at 1:22 am

    […] guest Ken Shirriff goes over the […]

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