Top all-time · #1389
Chris Fenton
Personal blog · chrisfenton.comhardwarewriting
Chris Fenton's personal blog at chrisfenton.com covers hardware and writing. Since 2009, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 97 times, most often “Homebrew Cray-1A”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2024-12-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Homebrew Cray-1A11 people · 15 mentions · first linked 2012-09-23
- Homebrew Cray-1A9 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-08-10
- ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop5 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-12-03
- DD9 Kaypro Edition4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-04-02
- Take that Babbage A working mechanical computer.4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2013-06-10
- Cray-1 Digital Archeology4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2012-09-23
- Cos (OS of the Cray) recovery story3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2014-10-13
- A working scale model Cray-1A3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-08-30
- The Numbotron3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-01-05
- Exploring Kaypro Video Performance3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-12-31
What Hacker News says?
Awesome project! I built a somewhat similar 30-pixel display: https://www.chrisfenton.com/the-pixelweaver/ Mine was entirely mechanical (driven by punch cards and a hand-crank), and changed all of the pixels in parallel, but a lot of the mechanism development looked extremely familiar to me.
Comment linking /the-pixelweaver/
on “Show HN: I spent 6 years building a ridiculous wooden pixel display”Submitted ZedRipper: A 16-core Z80 laptop as a story · 814 points
HN discussionIt's as awesome as you imagine: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/
Comment linking /the-zedripper-part-1/
on “The 100 MHz 6502”Submitted 1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch as a story · 382 points
HN discussionFPGAs are particularly amazing for this sort of project where you would otherwise need a custom ASIC that could never be even remotely economical to build (see my 16-core Z80 laptop as another excellent example: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-zedripper-part-1/ ). It lets you play 'fantasy computer architect.'
Comment linking /the-zedripper-part-1/
on “1/25-scale Cray C90 wristwatch”Submitted Homebrew Cray-1A as a story · 228 points
HN discussionAnother obscure way to generate the fibonacci sequence - Compute the fibonacci sequence on a hand-cranked mechanical computer: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-turbo-entabulator/
Comment linking /the-turbo-entabulator/
on “An integer formula for Fibonacci numbers”Submitted Homemade Speakers as a story · 154 points
HN discussionBut only because hardware got much faster, with larger resources (memory, disk). I just did a Stupid Benchmark, compiling this code: /* * Standard 'C' demo... Say hello to the world * * Compile command: cc hello */ #include <stdio.h> main() { printf("Hello world\n"); } (I know, not completely valid ANSI C code). On my home system (32 bit 2.6GHz intel gobs of RAM yada yada) it took GCC 0.2 seconds to compile and link…
Comment linking /homebrew-cray-1a/%22>hobbyist
on “An immutable operating system”Submitted Homebrew Cray-1A as a story · 107 points
HN discussionThe rationale is that most people will never approach those kind of number of P/E cycles The flip side of that is most people could now have drives that don't cost all that much more, but last much longer. Most SLC tends to be rated for 100K cycles and 10 years of retention; assuming a roughly inverse correlation, at 10K or 1K cycles the retention goes up considerably to a century or more. The consumer market is sim…
Comment linking /cray-1-digital-archeology/
on “The SSD Endurance Experiment: Only Two Remain After 1.5PB”Submitted A working scale model Cray-1A as a story · 102 points
HN discussion> It's too bad it's always existing companies that get their source leaked. Just once I'd like to see "Archive of Digital Equipment Corporation source code leaked online". I can dream... The problem is those companies are defunct, so their source repositories may not even exist anymore, let alone be online, e.g.: http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ > After searching the internet exhaustively, I contacted th…
Comment linking /homebrew-cray-1a/
on “Lapsus$ hackers leak 37GB of Microsoft's alleged source code”Submitted Electromechanical Lunar Lander as a story · 80 points
HN discussionOf course it depends on what you consider "low end" - it's relative to your expectations. I have a G4 TiBook, the definition of a high-end laptop, by 2002 standards. If you consider a $300 laptop a good daily driver, I'll one-up you with this: < https://www.chrisfenton.com/diy-laptop-v2/ >
Comment linking /diy-laptop-v2/
on “Ask HN: What is the best LLM for consumer grade hardware?”Submitted The Numbotron as a story · 69 points
HN discussionI came pretty close: http://www.chrisfenton.com/the-turbo-entabulator/
Comment linking /the-turbo-entabulator/
on “Lego Mechanical Computer”Submitted Non-Von Neumann Supercomputer in an FPGA as a story · 68 points
HN discussionI built a whimsical LLM-driven robot to provide running commentary for my yard: https://www.chrisfenton.com/meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/
Comment linking /meet-grasso-the-yard-robot/
on “Our LLM-controlled office robot can't pass butter”Submitted Homebrew Cray-1A as a story · 63 points
HN discussionThe recovery of the data from the HD is particularly impressive: http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/
Comment linking /cray-1-digital-archeology/
on “Homebrew Cray-1A”Submitted 2-Stage Light Gas Gun as a story · 60 points
HN discussionMan, this guy has some great articles. http://www.chrisfenton.com/cray-1-digital-archeology/ http://www.chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/ I just wish he'd made higher resolution pictures. He's also seriously hardcore (or maybe I feel out of depth because I'm a software guy): > I built a robot that would manually move the head forward 1/5200th of an inch at a time (there are 400 data tracks per inch, so this gives me a w…
Comment linking /cos-recovery/
on “Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1”Submitted Homebrew Cray-1A as a story · 60 points
HN discussionHere’s a simulator: https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
Comment linking /homebrew-cray-1a/
on “Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1”Submitted Cray-1 Digital Archeology (2011) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionA real working Cray 1 is a bit hard to find today, but in addition to the FPGA version by Chris Fenton that was already mentioned ( https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/ ), there is also a simulator for various Cray models at https://github.com/andrastantos/cray-sim The biggest problems will be finding a C compiler for the Cray and adding a framebuffer output, I think... but this is a very nice challenge :).
Comment linking /homebrew-cray-1a/
on “Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1”Submitted Electromechanical Lunar Lander as a story · 49 points
HN discussionThis guy made one. https://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/
Comment linking /homebrew-cray-1a/
on “Nobody ever ported Doom to run on a Cray 1”Submitted Homebrew Cray-1A (2010) as a story · 41 points
HN discussion
