Punched card by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Served as both input, output and storage system in the eary days!
Video 1.
1964 IBM 029 Keypunch Card Punching Demonstration by CuriousMarc (2014)
Source.
Video 2.
Using Punch Cards by Bubbles Whiting (2016)
Source. Interview at the The Centre for Computing History.
Video 3.
Once Upon A Punched Card by IBM (1964)
Source. Goes on and on a bit too long. But cool still.
Video 1.
The 1890 US Census and the history of punchcard computing by Stand-up Maths (2020)
Source. It was basically a counting machine! Shows a reconstruction at the Computer History Museum.
Tape drive by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
One of the most enduring forms of storage! Started in the 1950s, but still used in the 2020s as the cheapest (and slowest access) archival method. Robot arms are needed to load and read them nowadays.
Video 1.
Web camera mounted insite an IBM TS4500 tape library by lkaptoor (2020)
Source. Footage dated 2018.
Random-access memory by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
In conventional speech of the early 2000's, is basically a synonym for dynamic random-access memory.
Erase SSD securely by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
You can't just shred individual sSD files because SSD writes only at large granularities, so hardware/drivers have to copy stuff around all the time to compact it. This means that leftover copies are left around everywhere.
What you can do however is to erase the entire thing with vendor support, which most hardware has support for. On hardware encrypted disks, you can even just erase the keys:
TODO does shredding the
Flash memory by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Engineering Puzzle of Storing Trillions of Bits in your Smartphone / SSD using Quantum Mechanics by Branch Education (2020)
Source. Nice animations show how quantum tunnelling is used to set bits in flash memory.
E Ink by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Electronic Ink such as that found on Amazon Kindle is the greatest invention ever made by man.
Once E Ink reaches reasonable refresh rates to replace liquid crystal displays, the world will finally be saved.
It would allow Ciro Santilli to spend his entire life in front of a screen rather in the real world without getting tired eyes, and even if it is sunny outside.
Ciro stopped reading non-code non-news a while back though, so the current refresh rates are useless, what a shame.
OMG, this is amazing: getfreewrite.com/

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact