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Connection Machine 1. Best blinky lights ever.

The movie industry were inspired by the Connection Machine series of supercomputers. Every processor
in the computer had a LED that lit up when it was in use, and since there were thousands of processors,
there were thousands and thousands of lights.

Very large image

Moto did this many years ago with the PowerStack:
http://www.corestore.org/Mvc-002s.jpg
http://www.corestore.org/powerstack.jpg

The bottom unit is the main computer (CPU, boot drives, etc.), the upper unit is a media expansion (more drives of various types), and I believe there were other expansion units available as well (with a cover plate above it to make it look nice). You could stack up and up and up, taking up the same footprint as a base unit - unlike the design in the article, where it stacks out to the sides and has a limited range.

Granted, I didn't read the article - I'm merely catching up on my /. reading - so I don't know where the DRM reference comes in, but the modular/stackable design is definitely nothing new.

Moto did this many years ago with the PowerStack:
http://www.corestore.org/Mvc-002s.jpg
http://www.corestore.org/powerstack.jpg

The bottom unit is the main computer (CPU, boot drives, etc.), the upper unit is a media expansion (more drives of various types), and I believe there were other expansion units available as well (with a cover plate above it to make it look nice). You could stack up and up and up, taking up the same footprint as a base unit - unlike the design in the article, where it stacks out to the sides and has a limited range.

Granted, I didn't read the article - I'm merely catching up on my /. reading - so I don't know where the DRM reference comes in, but the modular/stackable design is definitely nothing new.

This reminds me of a lamp my brother made out of two (System/38?) IBM harddrives. IIRC it had 3 11" platters and some nice aluminium spacers between them with holes in it where the light would shine trough. He glued everything together and put a halogen lamp inside. Very cool, but unfortunately the glue couldn't resist the heat so it took out the VCR on it's way down.. The drive itself was really heavy too, it even had warning signs on it :-)

Embedded? If you gut the case, you could just set the whole G5 in there.

You could probably sit in there while you use it too.

Here

You challenge me to find an architecuture that has a non-power-of-2 word size? You haven't been around very long, have you?

Quick scan of google: PDP-10 emulator. The PDP-11 also had some interesting word size limitations: PDP-11 addresses were 16 bits, limiting program space to 64K, though an MMU could be used to expand total address space (18-bits and 22-bits in different PDP-11 versions). I see that an early design by Seymour Cray was 60-bit. You probably also know that the Itanium has a variable instruction bundle size.

Here is a link on porting gcc, including a warning on the word size. Not the best evidence, but it will have to do.