Power supplies...

Have you ever asked yourself how the power supply within you computer works? How complicated it is? Or how did it develop? I never did. For me, it was a black box that takes 220V (or 110V, depending where you live) on input and produces 12V/5V on output. Basically, you don't notice that they exist, but now and then you have some problems caused by them, e.g. when they fail, or when they are not powerful enough.

Today I stumbled on this article about power supplies. I have to say that it is well research article about modern power supplies. It was motivated by Steve Jobs' claim that the power supply within Apple ][ was revolutionary and that the guy that designed it, Rod Holt, didn't get a credit for it. So, the blog's author did an extensive research and found out that Jobs wasn't right. Anyway, I recommend that you read that post, it's very good with a lots of references.

It's interesting how I came accross that post. Initially I stumbled upon a post on Hacker News about some guy that left Google and this Guy explains why. Now, there are different opinions about this topic and maybe I write about it in the future, in the mean time, I found this post about power supplies to be rather interesting.

One more thing. That guy that wrote post about power supplies also wrote a post about iPhone USB charger that he bought cheaply in eBay. What's interesting is that this charger almost certainly doesn't follow safety regulations which means that you can suffer electrical shock. So, don't save money on something that can endanger your life!