It was the summer of 1987 and I was a kid on fire with the early PC revolution. Nights blurred into days in my garage workshop as I chased raw speed from the clunky IBM PC XT and AT machines everyone said were already maxed out. I thought really? This was not new to me, I had already built the fastest IBM PC-AT in history. I was hot-rodding from stock 6 MHz to over 30 MHz. So this was my next exploration. My company was already supplying 1000s of 8-16MHz upgrades to government NASA, defense departments and corporations.

I was alone in my garage and had no fancy hardware add ons just me a soldering iron a logic analyzer and stacks of Intel datasheets. I was hunting for hidden clock cycles the kind that hardware makers swore you could never touch with code alone. What I found became my first great adventure and it all started with the dark se ...