Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

The Curious Case of the Converging UNIX Workstation

2025-07-20

The author, having amassed a collection of 1990s RISC/UNIX workstations from SGI, HP, and DEC, noticed a peculiar trend in their internal layouts after watching a video on PC case history. Early models adhered to traditional VME bus designs. However, later models surprisingly adopted a layout reminiscent of the LPX standard – a flat motherboard with rear I/O and a left-side expansion slot. This bears a striking resemblance to contemporary PC designs. The author speculates on whether this was independent convergence or a collaborative effort, leaving the question of coincidence versus design trend unanswered, but prompting intriguing questions about the evolution of hardware design.

Reverse Engineering the Boot Process of a 90s AlphaStation 500

2025-04-03

The author acquired a broken AlphaStation 500 workstation and embarked on a journey to understand its boot process. The investigation centered around the SROM (Serial ROM), which contained eight multiplexed images selectable via jumpers. Using Python and Rust, the author extracted and decoded the SROM data, revealing Alpha machine code. Analysis revealed the CPU directly controls a serial port using internal processor registers for bit-banging. While the AlphaStation's boot issue remains unsolved, the process uncovered the unique boot mechanism of this vintage workstation.

Raspberry Pi Launches RP2350 Microcontroller Family with Out-of-the-Box Rust Support

2025-03-18

Raspberry Pi announced the RP2350 family, its latest microcontrollers featuring out-of-the-box Rust support—a first for the industry. The RP2350 boasts dual Arm Cortex-M33 cores with FPU, and optionally dual RISC-V Hazard3 cores, switchable at runtime or boot time. Improvements include increased SRAM and Flash, more GPIOs, and enhanced peripherals, along with advanced features like secure boot and partition support. While still using USB 1.1, it maintains the same price point as its predecessor and offers several variants. The blog post delves into booting, partition tables, address translation, and OTP functionality, demonstrating Rust code porting and execution examples.