radio electronics article
- BUILD THE MARK 8 - Radio Electronics July 1974 (classiccmp.org)
The Radio-Electronics Mark-8 Mini-computer is a complete microcomputer which may be used for a number of purposes, including data acquisition, data manipulation and control of experiments. It may also be used to send data to a larger computer or to a terminal such as the Radio-Electronics TV Typewriter, (September 1973) and it is easily interfaced with a keyboard. The keyboards do not have to be ASCII encoded since the microcomputer itself can convert the input code to an equivalent ASCII code for output. This Minicomputer is not a glorified calculator and it is not intended just for educational use. It can be interfaced to a calculator (a possible future project if readers are interested) to perform complex mathematical routines, and it may also be used as a teaching tool.
- Antenna diodes in the Pentium processor (righto.com)
I was studying the silicon die of the Pentium processor and noticed some puzzling structures where signal lines were connected to the silicon substrate for no apparent reason. Two examples are in the photo below, where the metal wiring (orange) connects to small square regions of doped silicon (gray), isolated from the rest of the circuitry. I did some investigation and learned that these structures are “antenna diodes,” special diodes that protect the circuitry from damage during manufacturing. In this blog post, I discuss the construction of the Pentium and explain how these antenna diodes work.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark-8
- Mark-8 (Wikipedia)
The Mark-8 is a microcomputer design from 1974, based on the Intel 8008 CPU (which was the world’s first 8-bit microprocessor). The Mark-8 was designed by Jonathan Titus, a Virginia Tech graduate student in chemistry. After building the machine, Titus decided to share its design with the community and reached out to Radio-Electronics and Popular Electronics. He was turned down by Popular Electronics, but Radio-Electronics was interested and announced the Mark-8 as a ’loose kit’ in the July 1974 issue of Radio-Electronics magazine.