cards

A man is making a fortune selling Yu-Gi-Oh cards he found in the trash. Or that’s what he says

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When it comes to collectible card games, the first one that comes to mind is ‘Magic: The Gathering’but he is not the only one. There are other highly sought-after games in the world of collecting such as Yu-Gi-Oh, the card game based on the Japanese manga of the same name and the protagonist of this crazy story. What has happened? They count in 404media that a Texas man claims to have found a stack of Yu-Gi-Oh cards in a dumpster, valued at almost $1 million. What at first seemed like a peculiar stroke of luck has unleashed a drama, with part of the community accusing him of having stolen them and his mother intervening to defend him. The beginning of the drama. In late March, several uncut sheets of Yu-Gi-Oh cards appeared on eBay, Facebook, and TikTok. It immediately attracted the attention of the community because it is very rare for these types of leaves to appear for sale. The usual thing when there is a printing error (for example, a color does not come out correctly or a plate is misaligned) is that those sheets are destroyed and in fact Konami, the company behind Yu-Gi-Oh, is very strict about this. They do give out sheets of 3×3 cards as prizes in some tournaments, but they do not allow their sale and in the past they have intervened when they have detected this type of products on online sales platforms. In total, the “stash” consists of more than 500,000 bulk letters and at least 400 uncut factory sheets, almost nothing. Suspicious. Besides the rarity of what he was selling, there were other factors that were highly suspicious. Instead of selling slowly and at high prices, it began to sell at prices well below its value and very visibly on different platforms. In the ads there were blurry photos with hundreds of sheets of ultra-rare letters, piled up like trash. Each of these sheets can cost thousands of dollars, so their value is enormous, and selling one sheet occasionally is one thing, selling hundreds set off all the alarms. Theft accusations. The seller, who claimed on Facebook to have already made “over $60,000 on these damn Yu-Gi-Oh! cards out of the trash,” had very erratic behavior: he posted ads with titles that didn’t match what he was selling, deleted posts, and posted strange comments. The case reached Uncut Sheet Collectors Facebook Groupwhere the majority agreed that the letters had to be stolen, something that did not please the seller, who commented insisting that he had found them in the trash, but no one believed him. Maternal intervention. “Well, let me ask you all: if you found the same thing that was found in the trash (the uncut sheets, the cards and so on), would you try to sell it or not?” said the seller’s mother in one of the posts in the Facebook group. In addition, he asked that a video compiling several advertisements published by his son be removed because it was exposing “his past history.” Until that point, no one had looked into the seller’s past, but the mother’s message caused a Streisand effect and they discovered that he had a criminal record for theft. What was missing. What if in the end he told the truth? It’s not entirely clear, but there are hints that the dumpster story could be true. The strongest one is that the mother owns a company in Dallas, which is where one of the factories is located. Cartamundi, company dedicated to the manufacture and distribution of collectible cards. Furthermore, some of the prints he sent were in very poor condition, which would be consistent with having found them in a container. In redditthe consensus is that they really came out of the trash and that the seller was inexperienced and was overwhelmed by the situation. The last thing known about the seller is that on May 4 he posted on Facebook that he was “back in business.”

Speculation with Pokémon cards is such a serious problem that some stores already give knowledge tests to their customers

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In 2024, global sales of ‘Pokémon’ collectible card game They reached 2.2 billion dollars, with a growth of 25% compared to the previous year. The Pokémon Company increased production up to 10.2 billion letters by 2025. During the pandemic, Logan Paul and other content creators began opening envelopes on videos that reached millions of views. Since then, the fever has not stopped growing, and stores are beginning to propose unusual tests to distinguish genuine buyers from resellers. This is a test. At the west branch of Ikebukuro, in Tokyo, the specialty store Bic Camera made a decision that would separate the buyers of ‘Pokémon’ trading cards from the scalpers: to buy packs of the latest expansion, Ninja Spinner, you must first beat a written questionnaire of 15 questions about the ‘Pokémon’ universe without a cell phone, without help and in Japanese. It’s just the beginning. The questionnaire is not the only requirement. Shoppers must have an active loyalty account in the chain, either via app or physical card, allowing staff to spot suspiciously frequent purchases. Additionally, the store applies a limit of one box per customer and removes the seal and outer packaging upon delivery: an opened product loses much of its value on the secondary market, where resellers need the seal intact to inflate prices. According to X user Ryo Saeba, the system is working: Several resellers failed the test and left without product, since due to the random nature of the questionnaire it cannot be prepared in advance. It is a problem that, however, does not have an easy solution even from The Pokémon Company: if more copies of the most in-demand cards are printed, speculation would be reduced, but competitive play would be affected, as would the feeling of exclusivity of finding a rare card in a pack. Why Ninja Spinner. The Ninja Spinner expansion is the Japanese version of the western Chaos Rising, scheduled for release on May 22, and which features Mega Greninja ex as the main card. The former Mega Greninja gold card was worth $593 in March and It is now quoted in thousands.. An envelope that costs around 5 euros in the store can be resold for 40 in a matter of hours. The bad yen. Additionally, there is an additional economic factor that makes the reseller problem more serious: the structural weakness of the yen, combined with the relatively affordable price of the boxes, has made Pokémon cards a common target of foreign buyers and international resellers. Japan-exclusive releases, which include illustrations and finishes not available in other markets, multiply the appeal. Sometimes new items last minutes on shelves before ending up on resale platforms. How they do it. Professional resellers have tactics to circumvent the control systems that stores establish to give preference to real buyers: they hire several people to wait in line simultaneously, use multiple payment cards and create fake accounts to access online reservations. In October 2025Japanese police arrested two Vietnamese citizens who had created thirty fictitious accounts using fraudulently obtained SIM cards to participate in purchase raffles and obtain dozens of boxes that summer. Other initiatives. Other Bic Camera branches have adopted measures such as requiring a driver’s license or Japanese tax identification document, which limits purchases to residents. Official Pokémon Center stores also maintain strict unit limits per customer to preserve prices close to the official one. Outside Japan there has also been a lukewarm response to the activity of the scalpersname as resellers are known in the sector: Walmart, for example, introduced a limit of five packs per purchase at the end of 2024 after a video with 12 million views on TikTok showed a scalper emptying a store’s entire display in one trip. Header | Pexels In Xataka | In 2016, millions of people went out to hunt Pokémon on the streets. In 2026 there will be autonomous robots guided by this

C-3PO had a boner in 1977 and was seen on thousands of trading cards. Until the parents realized

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As is well known, ‘Star Wars‘ was revolutionary in 1977 on many levels, but in no way was it more so than in merchandising. The story of the action figures and how Kenner beat Mattel by taking over the exploitation rights to the franchise is the most popular part of the story, but there are many other crazy anecdotes in a field that was literally beginning to be sown. For example, Topps launched a collection of trading cards with a very peculiar copy: 207 of the fourth series, with a nondescript image of C-3PO emerging from an oil bath. It lasted until the parents took notice. The sticker war. Sticker rights They were also disputed very briefly, as was the case with the action figures. Donruss, a company with experience in science fiction trading card collections, had the first option on the license and rejected it. Topps came in after some hesitation, put out a first series and watched it run out at an unprecedented rate. Five series later in 1977 alone, the film was still in theaters, and the company had to launch, with almost no time for revisions, series after series. For the fourth, the available photographs were almost the same as those already used in the first two, and that was where the problem arose. C-3PO oily. The controversial photograph showed C-3PO emerging from an oil bath. At first glance nothing seemed scandalous, but if you paid attention, the protocol droid seemed to have bypassed protocol with a large metallic appendage. The chrome earned its own nickname, “Golden Rod.” Parents’ complaints They didn’t take long to arrivethe letter was withdrawn and an airbrushed version produced. What happened really. There are three versions about the reasons that led to the error. The first, when in 2007 the official ‘Star Wars’ website published an explanation later removed: It was an optical effect because at the exact moment the photo was taken, a piece of the suit came off and was aligned in a way that suggested the obscene image. In his book ‘Star Wars: The Original Topps Trading Card Series, Volume One’, author Gary Gerani raised another theory: someone from the prop team on the set had placed a metal appendage as a joke between colleagues. Because. The most detailed explanation was given in 2019 by Anthony Daniels himself, the android’s interpreter, in promoting his autobiography ‘I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story’. According to the actor, the oil was real and C-3PO’s suit at that time consisted of two pieces of thin plastic (front and back) joined with gold-colored adhesive tape. The oil dissolved that tape and when Daniels left the bathroom, the pieces separated and formed a crease in the crotch that created the bulge. Additionally, the actor believes that a Topps employee, when processing the photograph, identified the crease and deliberately accentuated it. Error wanted. Paradoxically, the corrected version of chrome 207 is today rarer than the original. There are more than 1,800 copies of the card with the error compared to less than 700 of the amended version, since the error circulated for months before being removed, and the correction arrived at the end of the fourth series, with smaller print runs, and was quickly eclipsed by the fifth series. And how much is it worth? In medium condition it costs 30 or 40 dollars, but in good condition it can exceed 5,000. By the way: Daniels has systematically refused to sign the error card. Any copy with his autograph is a fake, he says. In Xataka | This Star Trek movie was canceled in 1977 because science fiction had no future. Two weeks later Star Wars premiered Header | Kory Westerhold on Flickr

The question is not whether the eSIM will replace physical SIM cards. The question is when

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We have been telling you for years how technology eSIM It is gaining ground little by little, so much so that today it is normal for smartphones to include these chips as a complement to physical SIM cards. It is a technology with its advantages and disadvantages, But it is increasingly clear that the idea is not that both technologies coexist, but that the eSIM ends up making physical cards disappear. At least that is the direction in which the industry seems to be heading if we look at the steps of recent years. This makes the question no longer whether it will happen, but when will it start to happen. There are no dates or calendars set for this technological change, but there are data and projections that seem to point to the next decade. The slow but sure adoption of the eSIM Evolution of SIM cards. Source: Thalesgroup Since their creation in 1991, SIM cards have become smaller and smaller. SIMs began to become MiniSIM, and then they became MicroSIM, and then the NanoSIM that the vast majority of mobile phones currently use. The next evolutionary step was eSIMan internal chip of the mobile phone where the data that has always been on the SIM cards can be downloaded and installed. This opens the door for you to have on your mobile not only the data of your operator, but also that of other third-party services specialized in cheap eSIM such as Saily of NordVPN and the like. Saily eSIM in +200 destinations, prepaid and with an extra level of security The price could vary. We earn commission from these links eSIM chips were created in the last decade, and over the years they have also been miniaturized to take up less and less space. But one thing is the existence of technology and another its implementation on commercial deviceswhich has been slow. First they began to arrive at smart watches like the Samsung Gear S2 Classic 3G of 2016, being a solution to give them connectivity without having to spend space in a physical card slot. And in 2017 the first compatible smartphones began to arrive, such as the Pixel 2 from Google (although it was only compatible with Google Fi) and since then they have been reaching more and more mobile phones. Until recently, the eSIM has been implemented as a complementary alternative to the SIM. Almost all users continue to use the SIM, but if you went abroad and needed a data card it was easier to contract an eSIM. There were also the most curious users starting to test this technology. Since then, the eSIM has begun to reach other devices such as home automation products, and even laptops. Some manufacturers like Apple have taken risks to promote the eSIM. First it was in 2022 with the iPhone 14which would be sold without a SIM card slot in the United States, and in 2025 launched the iPhone Aironly with eSIM in the United States, although in Spain it still has a physical slot. But currently this remains a rarity in Europe. The eSIM in Spain It already has the support of almost all operators. Besides, There is research that points Because in 2024, 70% of new mobile phones had support for this technology, and 10 to 15% did not have a physical SIM slot, numbers that will gradually grow. What are the benefits of the eSIM The main benefit of the eSIM is that you no longer have to request cards when contracting a service. And if you port, you won’t have to wait for a card to be sent to you either, although this will always depend on the method the operator uses to synchronize the eSIM, since sometimes you will need to receive documentation. Of course, you should know that activating an eSIM can take hours, or even a couple of days, until they send you the necessary keys. Furthermore, in all ports you will be asked for your identification by law, and depending on the operator you may even need to physically go to a store, something that is to avoid fraud. You won’t need to order duplicate SIMs either. if you want to use your data or phone number on multiple devices. In addition, there will be more facilities for using more than one data or calling rate on a single mobile phone, since there is support for storing the profiles of different operators and changing them as needed. There are also other advantages such as greater security. No one will be able to remove your SIM and steal it, because it is integrated and cannot be accessed. Besides, manufacturers save space physically inside their phones as they do not have this slot, something they can take advantage of, for example, to give their batteries more capacity. However, eSIMs also have some disadvantages. The main thing is to change your mobile phone can be somewhat more cumbersome, since it requires an extra process to migrate the data from the digital card. If you change to another mobile phone with the same operating system it is relatively easy, but changing from Android to iPhone or vice versa can be complicated. The eSIM will coexist quite a bit with the SIM No, the physical SIM is not going to disappear overnight. It’s going to be quite a long process. It will probably take more than a decade.although this is something that can always change depending on how manufacturers push in that direction. According to CCS Insight forecasts in 2025 collected by the BBCat the end of 2024 there were 1.3 billion smartphones with eSIM in use, and the figure is expected to reach 3.1 billion in 2030. Therefore, we are going to have sustained growth in mobile phones with eSIM. But this does not mean that traditional SIMs are going to stop being used at the same rate, but rather that most mobile phones will continue to use both technologies for … Read more

First the PS5 rises in price by 100 euros and now the lack of chips forces Sony to stop selling SD and CFexpress cards in Japan

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Buying a computer, a mobile phone or a console is much more expensive today than it was a couple of years ago and the voracious appetite of data centers is to blame for this component crisis: RAM has become more expensivemore of the same for NAND storage (and therefore, of SSDs) and already threatens even to the batteries. And consumer electronics manufacturers are making moves to avoid swallowing the price rise resulting from this imbalance between supply and demand. If we talk about gaming, a couple of days ago Sony threw a bucket of cold water on those who expected its latest console to drop in price over time because it has been the opposite: The PS5 will go up 100 euros in April. But it is not Sony’s only drastic measure: in Japan have announced that stop selling storage cards. When you see your neighbor’s beard cut… NAND memory chip shortage is wreaking havoc If you have tried to buy a memory card in recent months, you will have already realized that prices have gone up a lot for that common little device that we use for photography, gaming or the Raspberry Pi (which also its price has skyrocketed due to the component crisis). Well, Sony has gone one step further and has indefinitely suspended the acceptance of orders for almost all of its line of CFexpress Type A, Type B and SD cardswhether for authorized distributors or those who buy from the Sony Store. The brief Sony Japan statement is blunt: “Due to the global shortage of semiconductors (memory) and other factors, it is expected that supply will not be meet the demand for CFexpress and SD memory cards in the near future. Therefore, we have decided to temporarily suspend the receipt of orders from our authorized dealers and customers in the Sony store from March 27, 2026. As for the resumption of accepting orders, we will study it based on the supply situation and will announce it separately on the product information page.” It is no longer just the temporary suspension, it is that there is no return date and the reality is that the medium-term future looks bleak: it does not seem that this shortage of components will be resolved in the coming months. In fact, the conflict between the United States, Israel and Iran It is bringing other consequences beyond the rise in fuel prices: helium shortageessential in cooling operations in chip manufacturing It is true that this statement is restricted only to Japanbut the shortage is not exclusive to the Asian country: a quick search for SD in the Sony Store in Spain It returns just four models, one moderately affordable 64GB and then three others of 128GB, 256GB and 512GB that cost around 300 euros. One of the most affected models are the TOUGH cards used in professional photography and the entry-level SD cards. What you can buy today on the Sony website About a month ago the CEO of Phison, one of the major suppliers of controllers for SSDs and memory cards, he already warned: If the situation does not improve, this shortage may end the closure of consumer electronics companies completely in 2026. In Xataka | Not content with bursting demand and prices for RAM, AI is already targeting another victim: batteries In Xataka | The current generation of consoles was supposed to be “weak” and the games were expensive. Well: nothing has stopped the PS5 Cover | Xataka

Mistral is the AI ​​that is playing its cards best. Because it is taking advantage of the fever for European technological sovereignty

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To the cheetah being silent, Mistral grows like foam. The French artificial intelligence startup claims that its revenue has multiplied by 20 over the past year, and they have achieved it with a particularly striking and effective strategy: defending and promoting European technological sovereignty. what has happened. Arthur Mensch, co-founder and CEO of Mistral, explains in Financial Times that its latest annualized revenue rate — which estimates annual revenue based on last month’s revenue — was above $400 million. A year ago that rate was only 20 million a year. Or what is the same: he has multiplied it by 20. This works. The startup based in Paris hasn’t stopped to grow since its beginnings and last year already was valued at 12,000 million euros. That figure may soon become obsolete, because the company is on track to surpass $1 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of the year if it continues this growth. Between their alliances more striking is the one who signed with ASML in September 2025: that was when the Dutch company invested 1.3 billion euros in it. It is not making too much noise, but it continues to grow with a key component. Companies in power. Mistral is rapidly expanding the number of large enterprise clients it works with. Right now it has more than 100, and although it is not especially popular among end users – who tend to choose models from Big Tech companies in the US – the option for these European companies is increasingly clear. If they want not to depend on infrastructure and control outside Europe, they now have Mistral as a great alternative. New data centers. The firm announced this Wednesday that it will invest 1.2 billion euros in a new data center in Sweden. It is the first center of its kind that the company will build outside of France, and Mensch explained that “We are diversifying and distributing our capacity throughout Europe.” That data center will be created in collaboration with EcoDataCenter, and is expected to be operational in 2027. The choice of Sweden was easy according to Mensch, who noted that it was very attractive because the energy there was “low in carbon emissions and relatively cheap.” Partners and clients deep inside but also outside the EU. Although Mistral is postulated as the great reference in terms of this “European AI”, it also has Microsoft and NVIDIA as investors. In fact its ambition is global, but the fact of being the only major European developer of foundational LLMs It has put it in the spotlight of all European companies that seek independence from partners from the US or China. ASML, Total Energies, HSBC and governments such as France, Germany and Greece already use Mistral’s services, and 60% of their revenue comes from Europe. A perfect speech for these times. The CEO of Mistral is clear about the strategy and has arrived at the right time to apply that strategy that defends European sovereignty: “Europe has realized that its dependence on American digital services was excessive and is now at a critical point. We give them (European companies) an advantage because we provide them with models, software and computing capacity completely independent of American players.” Data centers must be from European companies. Mensch also talked about all those data centers than Big Tech will create in Europe and, of course, in Spain: “It is important that we realize that it is not so useful (for States) to deploy computing resources if you only create data centers for US hyperscalers“. Or what is the same: having AI data centers from companies like Microsoft, Google or Amazon in Europe serves the interests of these companies much more than European interests. In Xataka | Europe has begun to become technologically and militarily independent from the United States. First stop: replace Starlink

Make the “most mysterious book in the world” with dice and cards. How we are understanding the Voynich manuscript without deciphering a single line

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Voynich is an old acquaintance of this house: for years, we have been tracking (and gutting) each of the attempts to decipher the “most mysterious manuscript in the world.” They have all been unsuccessful and that includes, of course, the attempts to some of the sharpest minds of history. Now, however, we have a new idea. And, despite not solving absolutely anything, it sounds very good. What is the Voynich manuscript? Let’s start at the beginning: Between 1404 and 1438someone somewhere started writing a book in a language or code that no one has been able to decipher. A book that, since its rediscovery in 1912, has baffled everyone and especially cryptographers. Overall, this is an extraordinarily strange piece (full of illustrations of rare or non-existent plants, astrological symbols, strange creatures and naked women) about which we know only a handful of things. We know, for example, that it is a natural language (or a code related to a natural language) because complies with Zipf’s Lawan empirical regularity that only occurs in natural languages ​​and that describes the frequency of appearance of words. Invented languages ​​(especially languages ​​invented in the 15th century) do not comply. We have known this since the 60s, but little else. And people are still trying to figure it out? Yes, absolutely yes. The Voynichians are a group of people who are extremely passionate (and ‘insistent’) about their manuscript and, in fact, have members in almost every social strata in the wide world. An example is today’s protagonist. A few weeks ago, the magazine Cryptology public a job of Michael A. Greshko in which a new and very interesting idea was proposed. Greshko is a renowned science journalist, he is an editor at Science and has worked for media such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, Nature, Scientific American and National Geographic. He is someone who is risking part of his prestige on this, come on. And what does he propose? Greshko has exposed something called “Naibbe cipher”. Basically, it is an encryption system that allows languages ​​such as Italian or Latin to be transformed into a pseudo-writing that preserves properties of ‘voynichés’ (the ‘language’ of the manuscript). Respect, for example, things like glyph frequencies or word lengths. All this, with plausible cryptographic tools for the 15th century. And that’s precisely what’s interesting: Greshko doesn’t try to “read” the book; It attempts to demonstrate that, at that time and starting from a common language, a text similar to that of the manuscript could be constructed. How to make your own Voynich at home. According to the work of Cryptologiathe Naibbe method does things like break words into blocks (splits ‘gatto’ into ‘g’, ‘at’ and ‘to’), uses random systems (like dice or card rolls), and generates a homophonic cipher (ciphers specially designed to “counter the main deciphering tool for monoalphabetic substitutions, frequency analysis”). So, have we solved the problem? Not even close. As I said, Greshko has not deciphered the manuscript. He has simply looked for ways in which that manuscript could have been produced. For years, artificial intelligence algorithms have failed in the translation of the Voynich and, as the author explains, this may be because they do not know very well what to look for. Systems like Naibbe draw constructive possibilities that expand the options among which we can search. And in that sense, yes: Voynich is still much smarter than us. Although we don’t know for how long. Image | Gunnar Klack In Xataka | No, no “artificial intelligence” has deciphered the Voynich manuscript

60 years ago they had to literally “slice” code into punched cards

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Nowadays, programmers have countless resources when developing their creations. It was even before the revolution of AI and vibe coding. “Click code” is complex, but at least it is relatively comfortable thanks to modern integrated development environments (IDE) that facilitate programming in all types of languages. Not only that: programming is free, and any relatively modest PC can do it, although AI assistants have increased costs. Half a century ago things were very different, and those who dedicated themselves to programming did so with significant obstacles. There were no personal computers, access to mainframes and servers was only for the privileged and there were not even monitors on which to see how you programmed. Everything was much more artisanal and uncomfortable, and punched cards are the legacy of an era that shows that any past time was not always better. Who needs a screen? I explained it in a Foone Twitter threada technology collector and historian who recounted how programmers got by in 1962. To begin with, those programmers had a very different image than the young people who today create giant companies from scratch with flip-flops in their college dorm room or a garage. These programmers tended to be adults who also dressed in a jacket and tie: the ways were different because to access this world one had to work for large companies, the only ones where you could have access to a mainframe of the time. The example that this technological historian gave was that of IBM 7090one of the first computers based on transistors and not on vacuum tubes, like its predecessor, the IBM 709. That was a revolution in power, because the performance of the previous one was multiplied by six and the IBM 7090 managed to execute 100,000 floating point operations per second. But as we said, to program that computer there was no interface like the current one: you did not write while seeing the code on the screen. They were also not multi-user or multi-threaded systems, so only one person could use “all” that power at a time. That made these machines very precious and very expensive assets that IBM actually rented. In 1962 he rented one of these computers for a month It cost $63,500.which with inflation would be equivalent to $421,000 today. If we do a simple division (a month has about 44,000 minutes), each minute of use of that computer would cost about 10 current dollars. In a couple of hours one had spent the same amount that a good PC or laptop costs today, for example. This imposed clear restrictions when using these machines, because time was money in them. That’s where punched cards came into play, which had a capacity of 80 characters each, the maximum size of a line, although curiously the normal thing was to use only the first 72 characters and not go beyond there. The IBM template allowed you to program on paper without going overboard. To punch the cards, a special machine was used, which for example was manufactured by IBM itself and which could be mechanical or, if they were more modern, electromechanical. The idea was simple: the characters that someone typed on that machine were “translated” on the punched card, where perforations were made according to the characters on each line. To program, you didn’t sit down at that electromechanical machine and start typing commands without stopping. Instead the program was written by hand or typed. IBM had prepared templates that made it possible not to get lost and to avoid exceeding the number of characters per line. Wait, it took a while to run your program This meant that a program with all its lines ended up occupying a stack or deck of punched cards on which were all the instructions of the program, which also had to be perfectly ordered in the appropriate sequence. That deck of punched cards was given to the computer operators, who inserted them along with a task control card that told the system how and for how long it had to be executed, for example. Other programs could be in run queue (remember, it was one job at a time, and other programmers also used the same system), so it wasn’t just arriving and executing. This is what a computer program looked like in the 60s. That program could take a long time to complete its execution, so the programmer did not wait for the result to appear, but rather the operator left both the deck and the printed result in a small cubicle where the programmer could then access to pick it up. The problem, of course, is that the program could be wrong, not work or give an unexpected output. In that case, the error had to be detected, the punched card or cards that caused the error corrected, and the program run again. There were striking advances at that time such as being able to convert punched cards into stored programs on magnetic cassette tapessomething that made the reading of those punched cards faster. That was basically the process that programmers followed in their daily lives, who usually used FORTRAN or COBOL in their programs. These machines were used, for example, for the development of projects such as CTSS (Compatible Time-Sharing System), one of the first operating systems that was programmed by the MIT Computing Center. They were also used by NASA for the Mercury and Gemini space missions, and in fact an IBM 7904 was also used to run the flight planning software on the Apollo missionsbecause it had not yet been programmed for the new System/360 that had been acquired for NASA. There were also more curious applications that are still being explored today: in 1962, mathematicians Daniel Shanks and John Wrench were pioneers in using these computers for mathematical calculations and calculated the first 100,000 decimals of π. A year earlier, another mathematician, Alexander Hurwitz, used an IBM 7090 to discover the two largest prime numbers … Read more

There are discounts on graphics cards, monitors and more

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It is never a bad time to renew part of our setup, no matter if we are looking for a new peripheral or directly changing a part of our gaming PC. If we are at that point, we have a very good opportunity right now with the Christmas offers that PcComponentes has active. Store that, in fact, has its own advent calendar with daily offers. This promo, which will last until next December 26has discounts of up to 40% on all types of products such as cell phones, televisions or even video games. With them, we will have it easy to find that perfect gift, no matter if we have a budget of, for example, 30 euros either 100 euros. All taking into account that we will be able to return orders until January 15 and that we even have several options to finance our purchases. As usual, we have laptops, monitors, graphics cards and even notebooks at a good price. To make your task a little easier, we leave you below a selection of some of the most notable discounts: Palit GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card by 545.90 eurosan ideal GPU for gaming at 1440p. MSI MAG 276CXF Monitor by 246.73 euroscurved screen option with a refresh rate of 280 Hz. Toshiba Canvio Basics Hard Drive by 67.95 euroswith 2 TB of storage to take our files everywhere. Logitech G203 Lightsync Mouse by 19.99 eurosa great gaming mouse if we prioritize quality-price. Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card by 369 eurosideal for achieving top performance at 1080p. Palit GeForce RTX 5070 graphics card If we are looking for a new graphics card, this RTX 5070 from Palit is a great option right now: it is discounted to 545.90 eurosits all-time low so far. It is perfect for playing at 1440p with great performance, all without taking into account that thanks to it we will be able to use a technology as important as the DLSS 4. As for the design, it is a fairly minimalist assembly with three fans. Palit GeForce RTX 5070 Infinity 3 12GB GDDR7 Reflex 2 RTX AI DLSS4 Graphics Card The price could vary. We earn commission from these links MSI MAG 276CXF Monitor Choosing a monitor with a good response time and refresh rate is key if we want a gaming monitor, especially for playing competitive titles. This one from MSI fits there perfectly thanks to its rate of 280 Hz and a response time of 0.5 ms. In addition, it is a curved option, which is ideal for increasing immersion while we play. It is available for 246.73 euros. MSI MAG 276CXF 27″ LED Rapid VA FullHD 280Hz Adaptive Sync Curve Monitor The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Toshiba Canvio Basics Hard Drive Having a portable hard drive can allow us to carry files of all kinds with us from one computer to another, although it can also simply give us extra storage. This Toshiba HDD is one of the brand’s best sellers: it has 2 TB capacity, uses USB 3.2 and we have it available for 67.95 euros. Toshiba Canvio Basics 2TB Portable External Hard Drive USB 3.2 Black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Logitech G203 Lightsync Mouse There are few things more essential to play comfortably on a PC than a good gaming mouse. There are very interesting wireless options, although we can find wired models with a great quality-price ratio. This Logitech G203 is one of the most used models that is difficult to go wrong with, since it combines comfort, precision and design. It is available for 19.99 euros. Logitech G203 Lightsync 2nd Gen Gaming Mouse 8000DPI RGB Black The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT graphics card We close this selection of offers with another graphics card, although this time one from AMD. This is the RX 9060 In this case, it is a much more compact card than the previous one, since it has two fans. Costs 369 euros. Sapphire PULSE AMD Radeon RX 9060 XT 16GB GDDR6 FSR 4 Graphics Card The price could vary. We earn commission from these links Other outstanding offers from PcComponentes Some of the links in this article are affiliated and may provide a benefit to Xataka. In case of non-availability, offers may vary. Images | PcComponentes, Palit, MSI, Toshiba, Logitech, Sapphire In Xataka | Best laptops in quality price. Which one to buy based on use and seven recommended models In Xataka | What is the best laptop for working in 2025. Tips and recommendations

A quarter of a century ago a student put together 32 GeForce graphics cards to play Quake III. CUDA came from there

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In the year 2000 Ian Buck wanted to do something that seemed impossible: play Quake III in 8K resolution. Young Buck was studying computer science at Stanford, specializing in computer graphics, and then a crazy idea occurred to him: put together 32 GeForce graphics cards and render Quake III on eight strategically placed projectors. “That,” he explained years later, “was beautiful.” Buck told that story in ‘The Thining Machine’, the essay published by Stephen Witt in 2025 that traces the history of NVIDIA. And of course one of the fundamental parts of that story is the origin of CUDA, the architecture that AI developers have turned into a gem and that has allowed the company to boost and become the most important in the world by market capitalization. And it all started with Quake III. The GPU as a home supercomputer That, of course, was just a fun experiment, but for Buck it was a revelation, because there he discovered that perhaps specialized graphics chips (GPUs) could do more than draw triangles and render Quake frames. In 2006 the GeForce 8800 GTS (and its higher version, the GTX) began the CUDA era. To find out, he delved into the technical aspects of NVIDIA graphics processors and began researching their possibilities as part of his Stanford PhD. He gathered a small group of researchers and, with a grant from DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), began working on an open source programming language that he called Brook. That language allowed something amazing: making graphics cards become home supercomputers. Buck demonstrated that GPUs, theoretically dedicated to working with graphics, could solve general-purpose problems, and also do so by taking advantage of the parallelism offered by those chips. Thus, while one part of the chip illuminated triangle A, another was already rasterizing triangle B and another writing triangle C in memory. It wasn’t exactly the same as today’s data parallelism, but it still offered amazing computing power, far superior to any CPU of the time. That specialized language ended up becoming a paper called ‘Brook for GPUs: stream computing on graphics hardware‘. Suddenly parallel computing was available to anyone, and although that project barely received public coverage, it became something that one person knew was important. That person was Jensen Huang. Shortly after publishing that study, the founder of NVIDIA met with Buck and signed him on the spot. He realized that this capacity of graphics processors could and should be exploited, and began to dedicate more and more resources to it. CUDA is born When Silicon Graphics collapsed in 2005 – due to NVIDIA that was intractable in workstations – many of its employees ended up working for the company. 1,200 of them in fact went directly to the R&D division, and one of the big projects of that division was precisely to take forward this capacity of these cards. John Nickolls / Ian Buck. As soon as he arrived at NVIDIA, Ian Buck began working with John Nickolswho before working for the firm had tried—unsuccessfully—to get ahead of the future with his commitment to parallel computing. That attempt failed, but together with Buck and some other engineers he launched a project to which NVIDIA preferred to give a somewhat confusing name. He called it Compute Unified Domain Architecture. CUDA was born. Work on CUDA progressed rapidly and NVIDIA released the first version of this technology in November 2006. That software was free, but it was only compatible with NVIDIA hardware. And as often happens with many revolutions, CUDA took a while to gel. In 2007 the software platform was downloaded 13,000 times: the hundreds of millions of NVIDIA graphics users only wanted them for gaming, and it remained that way for a long time. Programming to take advantage of CUDA was difficult, and Those first times were very difficult for this projectwhich consumed a lot of talent and finances at NVIDIA without seeing any real benefits. In fact, the first uses of CUDA had nothing to do with artificial intelligence because artificial intelligence was barely talked about at the time. Those who took advantage of this technology were scientific departments, and only years later would the revolution that this technology could cause take shape. A late (but deserved) success In fact, Buck himself pointed this out in a 2012 interview with Tom’s Hardware in 2012. When the interviewer asked him what future uses he saw for the GPGPU technology offered by CUDA in the future, he gave some examples. He talked about companies that were using CUDA to design next-generation clothes or cars, but he added something important: “In the future, we will continue to see opportunities in personal media, such as sorting and searching photos based on image content, i.e. faces, location, etc., which is a very computationally intensive operation.” Here Buck knew what he was talking about, although he did not imagine that this would be the beginning of the true CUDA revolution. In 2012 two young doctoral students named Alex Krizhevsky and Ilya Sutskever They developed a project under the guidance of their supervisor, Geoffrey Hinton. The Nvidia Way: Jensen Huang and the Making of a Tech Giant (English Edition) The price could vary. We earn commission from these links That project was none other than AlexNetthe software that allowed images to be classified automatically and which until then had been a useless challenge due to the cost of the computing it required. It was then that these academics trained a neural network with NVIDIA graphics cards and CUDA software. Suddenly AI and CUDA were starting to make sense. The rest, as they say, it’s history. In Xataka | We can forget about AI without hallucinations for now. NVIDIA CEO explains why

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