feast your ocular orbs on this cross section of a miniature Nuvistor vacuum tube.

Funkiest QFN I have seen to date. Radar send and receive and digital measurement in the same chip and no external antennas needed! All of those perimeter vias are straight to the ground plane. This was from a board we assembled for a customer last year. ☆ ADMIRE THE MAGIC RUNES ☆

congrats to the whole Artemis team on a successful launch! wow, what a show.

i've been tinkering with IBM 729 tape units (1960s data storage tech). they're definitely not USB devices. check out the huge connectors they use!

this fine example of the "ligne claire" style with a very clear influence reminds me of the theory that Tintin, although canonically an asexual male, may actually be a woman. the other character in the illustration reminds me of Séraphin Lampion (Jolyon Wagg)...lol.

Listening to Episode 178 "The Programma 101". www.youtube.com/watch?v=5lpc... I listen while working on #vintagecomputer restoration. This Olivetti P101 still needs work. Being both digital logic and mechanical moving parts they are tough to work on. Thnx @adventofcomp.bsky.social #retrocomputing

so i upgraded the video card in my Sun SPARCstation 1 only to find out that the designers of the card, CURTIS and CHRIS M, left Sun to cofound Nvidia. but at least now i can order my pizza in color

last year i reverse engineered two entire graphics chips (~30k to 40k transistors), made a schematic, and Ian here turned it into working Verilog!

saw a lizard today. i think it is a Southern Alligator Lizard.

A thing arrived today.

TubeTime’s monochrome display adapter core ported to my PCI FPGA VGA passthrough board. Maybe the first PCI MDA card. Full intensity is white, everything else is bitwise abuse of a rainbow pattern generator.

Mountain View Reverse Engineering (mtvre) meetup on Wed! 7:00 pm at Wagon Wheel BBQ. Talks: - @tubetime.bsky.social on "HP 16717 PCB Reverse Engineering" (40 min) - @natashenka.bsky.social on "0-click Android exploits" (25 min)

I mean can you figure out a better way to help people pronounce ASCII?

New blog post! A what-if scenario where we try to see how a home computer designer might've dealt with the field-sequential color television, had the Korean War not stopped that standards' rollout. Enjoy! nicole.express/2026/the-app...

a bad Leisure Suit Larry game? no, it's Roy Lichtenstein in 1973.

Hooray! it's 34.5MHz!

this is the largest circuit board i've ever completely reverse engineered. 8 layers, larger than a sheet of paper, 1000s of nets, over 1000 parts. 🧵

I found the old 35mm slide for the cover for Neuromancer and had it scanned in for your pleasure. Enjoy!

New blog post: Remote diagnosing a PET 2001 video fault from one photograph. blog.tynemouthsoftware.co.uk/2026/02/diag... Includes a look at how the PET video system works with redrawn schematics. It also turns out to be a surprisingly early PET 2001.

I thought the name sounded familiar. This is the same billionaire who funded the construction of two Babbage difference engines. One was on display at the Computer History Museum (2008-2016). Myhrvold then took it back and put it in the lobby at Intellectual Ventures, a notorious patent troll.

there will be only one US semiconductor company, and it will be Rochester Electronics.

INSERT JUST PRINT

The new AirTags 2 just arrived! Time to take them apart 🧵

feast your optical orbs on this beautiful LN3-2A aircraft gimbal! www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak5S...

now streaming: more reverse engineering! www.twitch.tv/tubetimeus

I have big plans for spinny CRT

over on Mastodon, i made a thread with the highlights of 2025 for me: mastodon.social/@tubetime/11...

I've been busy trying to reverse engineer a fairly complicated circuit board.

now streaming: more reverse engineering! www.twitch.tv/tubetimeus

the AI designed the part; now let the AI machine it. yes, give it control over the X, the Y, and the Z. let's fucking go

Thoroughly enjoyed this book by @windell-oskay.bsky.social and @tubetime.bsky.social (with @righto.com). Cool to see the insides of so many electronics, especially some of the older stuff (Dubiler cap!). And the section on how they did it was also cool. Would love to illustrate some of these! 😉

can't wait to see Cat 5e.

Also, electronic television will be 100 years old in 2027 (the combination of electronic camera and display, though it would take another decade or so for it to be practical). The CRT itself actually dates back to the 19th century.

100 watt resistors normally don't look like this, but it's perfectly natural

My digital logic simulation of the IBM CGA now has color! And a release! github.com/dbalsom/cga_... #retrocomputing

This is so friggen cool, I want it

I propose a solution to our ongoing RAM shortage:

looking for a new writing desk and stumbled across this rare 1980s MacTable just called “drafting table” for $75

This Day in Labor History: December 2, 1984. A gas leak in a Union Carbide chemical plant in Bhopal, India killed somewhere between 3787 and 16,000 people. Let's talk about probably the worst industrial disaster in history and how U.S. companies can murder with impunity, then and now!

Since @averyredbox.bsky.social currently has the other Visitel unit back in the MidWest that I bought during the show and I have mine out tonight we tried testing a picture call over VoIP and it worked!

unbelievable, scrubbing with a magic eraser and then it works again

Stocking stuffer ideas for your retro collector: -Amtech flux -Solder braid -Sharp tweezers -Flush cutter -Machined dip sockets 8 up to 40pin -Ceramic capacitor assortment up to 10uF -Eye loupes -Magic erasers -kynar wire -DeoxIT with needle dispenser -Polypropylene safety cap assortment up to 1uf

take hold of the latest internets

back when apple wasn't good at kerning

so apparently the electrical system fault on the Dali that caused it to crash into the Francis Scott Key bridge was caused by a feral ferrule.

did you know that you can find free Cortex M0 development boards at the side of the road? folks call them disposable vapes but they're hackable, and i've reverse engineered a bunch of them! see github.com/schlae/VapeRE/

pick one of each: dot inside or dot outside? face, arrow, or circle-T?

T H I S I S R E A L T O U C H