A Belarus-based hobbyist site documenting hardware projects such as homemade CPUs, extreme overclocking, chip decapping and microcontroller programming.
HN links it for its hands-on hardware experiments, including homemade CPUs and liquid nitrogen overclocking, and commenters cite its microscopy and chip work.
Theoretically, optical media should be easier to recover than magnetic, because the technology to view their surfaces in detail is readily available --- a light microscope is enough to humanly view the actual recorded data on a CD and even a DVD:
https://3.14.by/en/read/cd-dvd-microscope
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8_HCLPdpkI (CD-R)
It would be interesting to see what "disc rot" looks like at that level of detail; and if better reading hardware may be able to read it. In particular, pressed discs actually store data in the varying height of the polycarbonate disc, so as long as those pits and lands haven't been damaged, even if the metallisation is gone, the data remains intact; and if there was a way to strip and re-coat that layer, pressed discs could be recovered. For CD-Rs, perhaps the dye has faded to the point where the typical drive (which can't really spin the disc slower than 1x) won't be able to discern the pits from the lands, but if that data can still be seen somehow, it's recoverable.
Kind of silly that you wouldn't use MongoDB yet you'd use GAE. GAE is a turd, Google has been struggling to compete in the cloud business and failed to come out with any value. You get locked into a Heroku-like platform with awful performance, awful stability, and arcane quotas.
http://www.carlosble.com/2010/11/goodbye-google-app-engine-gae/
http://3.14.by/en/read/why-google-appengine-sucks
Some time ago I posted exactly about that : https://zeptobars.com/en/read/how-to-open-microchip-asic-what-inside
My latest microscope is this one, but Casio photo was made by temporary microscope I assembled from Thorlabs & Olympus parts: https://3.14.by/en/read/olympus-bx60-fluorescence-metallurgical-microscope
It wouldnt even be hard emulation in a strict sense of the word. 8086 itself is microcoded. Anything from https://3.14.by/en/read/homemade-cpus will be able to run equivalent microcode. https://gigatron.io/ is about 1000 transistors/diodes, totally doable by hand if you are crazy enough.
Well, standard cell ASIC vs. full custom ASIC is a rather pedantic distinction IMHO :)
By the way, someone has already developped a full custom ASIC for Bitcoin mining: http://3.14.by/en/read/bitfury-bitcoin-mining-chip
I expected some extreme overclocking action complete with liquid nitrogen...
https://3.14.by/en/read/arduino-liquid-nitrogen-overclocking