mechanical computing

Devine Lu Linvega of Hundred Rabbits talks about low-power, offline computing, esoteric languages and the Uxn virtual machine, informed by years of sailing the Pacific. The talk frames computing sustainability through a permaculture lens.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

The Thought Emporium grows living rat neurons on an electrode array and tries to train them to play Doom. It is part of a series on biological computing.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

Breaking Taps explains how the cryogenic mirror actuators on the James Webb Space Telescope achieve nanometer precision using flexures. It shows a 3D-printed replica and how one motor handles both coarse and fine motion.

The trailer for Tim Hunkin's series The Secret Life of Components, eight guides to mechanical and electromechanical parts for designers and makers.

Lex Fridman interviews chip architect Jim Keller about the future of computing, AI, life and consciousness. Topics include CPU design, branch prediction and why imperfect designs often win.

A 2023 LLVM Developers' Meeting keynote by Abdul Dakkak, Chris Lattner and Jeff Niu introducing Mojo, a Python-family systems language built on MLIR and LLVM for heterogeneous computing.

A roughly 3.5-hour Gamers Nexus investigation into rising PC component prices, driven largely by AI data-center demand for memory and other hardware. It draws on interviews with industry figures to argue that personal computing and ownership are being eroded.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

Lex Fridman's long interview with Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM and Swift, covering the future of computing and programming languages. It touches on compilers, hardware, and his work at Apple, Tesla, Google and SiFive.

A 47-minute restoration of a 1920s IBM computing cheese cutter, a machine with parts patented between 1901 and 1907. The video covers the restoration work and explains why it is a computing cheese cutter.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

CuriousMarc connects a restored 1930 Model 15 Teletype to a Linux machine and uses it as a terminal, after commenters requested it. The video shows the challenges of linking a 5-bit mechanical device to a modern OS.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

Jared Owen's 3D animated breakdown of how a Brunswick GS-X bowling pinsetter works, showing its mechanisms for sweeping, lifting and resetting pins and balls.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1970 Wurlitzer 3400 jukebox to show how electromechanical relays and switches automated its behavior without a computer.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Jose Valim introduces Nx, the project bringing numerical computing to Elixir, covering multi-dimensional tensors, automatic differentiation and JIT compilation to CPU and GPU.

Freespin is a demo that runs on a Commodore 1541 floppy drive. It makes sound by vibrating the drive head and video by toggling the serial bus lines, and it keeps running after the C64 that booted it is disconnected.

Lex Fridman interviews Brian Kernighan, co-author of The C Programming Language and co-creator of AWK and AMPL. They discuss Unix, C, Go and his memoir on the history of Unix.

Marques Brownlee shares his hands-on impressions of Apple's $3500 Vision Pro headset after trying it. He covers the spatial computing experience, eye tracking, and how it compares to other devices.

Stuff Made Here designs and builds an "unpickable" lock, then calls in a locksmith to see if it can be defeated. It covers the mechanical design effort and the attempt to pick it.

Jim Keller, CTO of Tenstorrent, gives a keynote at Stanford's System X conference on change, understanding and the future of computing. He touches on Moore's Law, how far transistors are from physical limits, and ideas like DNA origami.

Quentin Perret of Google gives a technical deep dive into protected KVM (pKVM) on Arm64, a confidential computing approach for CPUs without hardware extensions. It explains how the nVHE hypervisor manages stage-2 MMU access control to protect guest memory.

Tech Tangents sets up original Doom's three-screen multi-monitor mode, which required a separate networked computer for each monitor. The video covers the hardware and setup work and the result.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

The Lock Picking Lawyer tests the supposedly unpickable lock designs built by the Stuff Made Here channel. He looks for bypasses and weaknesses in the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

NCommander investigates why Space Cadet Pinball disappeared from Windows Vista, building on Raymond Chen's explanation about 64-bit incompatibility. He tests it on 64-bit Windows including Itanium and walks through the debugging.

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

Razor 1911's eponymous demo celebrating 40 years of the group, which won first place at the Revision 2026 demo competition and the public's choice award. It is a retrospective of keygen and warez scene culture with chiptune music.

Ben Vallack walks through designing a custom keyboard PCB from scratch using Ergogen and KiCad, ending with a gerber file ready to order from a PCB fabricator. The example is a split keyboard.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

CuriousMarc's Apollo Guidance Computer restoration series looks at core rope memory, the ROM that held the Moon landing programs. Mike Stewart builds a custom reader to recover lost AGC programs.