GenieSteroids

A hardware experiment with borrowed courage — the C++ of the era given something stronger to run on. A build about the exhale of the bench: trying what the parts drawer said was borderline, and getting away with it.

Steroids in the naming is the 2012 kind of joke, and the project was the kind of project the joke describes: caps bulging past their ratings, timings pushed past the datasheet’s comfort, a circuit that worked because it was leaned on.

It exists because every bench needs at least one experiment that got away with it, to teach the bench what the rules were actually for.

In the old stories the gifts never come clean. The leprechaun’s gold is always buried under a plant you will forget by morning; the well that grants wishes grants the wording, not the meaning; and whatever the sídhe hand you at their fairs, the small print was in a tongue no living lawyer reads. Be careful what you ask the magical for is the load-bearing sentence of the entire genre. The 2012 bench took it as a dare. The parts drawer said a certain capacitor was only honest to sixteen volts; the datasheet said the same thing in smaller type; the story tradition said every gift has a catch and you find out what it was by plugging it in. So the Genie — a C++ experiment in an Athlone winter — was built on borrowed courage: parts run hot, timings leaned on, the whole rig a wish granted to the letter and not the spirit, which is the only way the old stories grant anything. And it worked, for the storybook reason that courage borrowed is the one interest-free loan. The catch, said the Genie afterward, in the tradition of all genies, is that now you know you can. The moss grows on it thick, in the way that moss grows fastest on whatever a workshop is proudest of and least willing to admit.