Ciro Santilli had once assigned this as one of Ciro Santilli's best random thoughts, but he later found that Wikipedia actually says exactly that: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_engineering ("similar to scientific research, the only difference being that scientific research is about a natural phenomenon") so maybe that is where Ciro picked it up unconsciously in the first place.
101 Crawfords Corner Rd Holmdel, NJ 07733 USA
It started with radio research apparently, including Karl Guthe Jansky.
They had a smaller building first: youtu.be/BPq_ZyOvbsg?t=51 and in 1962 opened the large new building.
Video 1.
Holmdel 20th Anniversary by AT&T Tech Channel (1982)
Source.
Video 2.
N.J.’s historic Bell Labs complex brought back to life as Bell Works by nj.com (2022)
Source. Shows the renewed building after the Bell Labs Holmdel Complex closure.
This is where they moved the Chicago Pile-1 after they decided it might be a bad idea to run highly experimental nuclear reactions right in the middle of one of the most populous cities of the United States.
After it was reassembled, the Chicago Pile-1 was renamed as Chicago Pile 2 (CP2).
So more precisely, it is a continuation of the Metallurgical Laboratory.
It's still not that far though, only about 20 kilometers, and today is also a populated area.
Ciro Santilli maintains that they chose the site because the name is so cool. Wikipedia says it is derived from the Forest of Argonne, maybe it even shared etymology with the element argon.
X-10 Graphite Reactor by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This was an intermediate step between the nuclear chain reaction prototype Chicago Pile-1 and the full blown plutonium mass production at Hanford site. Located in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Figure 1.
Exterior of the X-10 Graphite Reactor in 1950
. Source.
Figure 2.
Workers loading Uranium into the X-10 Graphite Reactor with a rod
. Source.
Mr. SQUID by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This is the cutest product name ever.
Since 1992, Mr. SQUID has been the standard educational demonstration system for undergraduate physics lab courses.
YBCO device, runs on liquid nitrogen.
Video 1.
Open Source 8.5 Digit Voltmeter from CERN by Marco Reps (2021)
Source.
CuriousMarc by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Mostly on vintage electronics. Lots of focus on microwave, which he has worked a lot with.
Has been going wild with restoration and reverse engineering of the Apollo moon mission.
Video 1.
Inside the WILD Lab of CuriousMarc by Keysight Labs (2022)
Source.
stress-ng by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
The interface is a bit annoying, but the tool is really cool.
100 cycles of matrixprod:
stress-ng -c1 --cpu-ops 100 --cpu-method matrixprod
man stress-ng gives the list of possible --cpu-method. It documents matrixprod as:
matrix product of two 128 × 128 matrices of double floats. Testing on 64 bit x86 hardware shows that this is provides a good mix of memory, cache and floating point operations and is probably the best CPU method to use to make a CPU run hot.
If you don't specify the --cpu-method it apparently loops through every method one by one.
Limit time to 1s instead of limiting cycles:
stress-ng -c1 -t1 --cpu-method matrixprod
Computer company by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
This section is about companies that were primarily started as computer makers.

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 5. . 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.
  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