Like many pre-21st-century technological artifacts including steam locomotives, audio tapes, and 4-bit microprocessors—16-bit processors have reached the end of their useful life. Steve Leibson, ...

Intel released the 80286 processor on February 1, 1982, making the CPU 44 years old. According to the company, the 16-bit chip represented a significant evolution ...

Forty years ago today, electronics and semiconductor trade newspaper Electronic News ran an advertisement for a new kind of chip. The Intel 4004, a $60 chip in a 16-pin dual in-line package, was an ...

Building a functioning 16-bit processor or CPU inside Microsoft Excel, with its own memory, output, and custom assembly language, is an impressive - if not entirely useful - feat. This is because ...

Increment and decrement. They sound like simple functions. But even the simplest functions can get quite complex in a microprocessor design. Ken Shirriff has written up a great blog post about his ...

Microprocessors are wondrous devices: They integrate the brain of a computer onto a single electronic component. The computing power that once required a room full of equipment now fits onto a ...

Guest author Ken Shirriff is a Silicon Valley-based computer enthusiast who enjoys reverse-engineering old chips and restoring classic equipment such as the Xerox Alto. Shirriff wrote the Arduino ...