Illustration of a positive pregnancy test.

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Pixabay

Pregnancy tests, currently sold in pharmacies for around ten euros, contain fine and fairly advanced technology.

So much so that the rods capable of analyzing urine would be as powerful as the very first computer, marketed by IBM in the early 1980s.

Foone, a netizen, had fun relaying his findings on Twitter after taking apart and analyzing a pregnancy test, Slate reports.

He noticed that the test components were comparable to those on the first IBM PC 5150s.

The stick has "only" 64 bytes of RAM but its architecture "gives it fairly good performance for a 4 megahertz processor," said the twittos.

It's a surprisingly complicated chip.

You might think it's very limited because it's only got 64 bytes of ram, but it's actually using a pipelined architecture to operate at 1 instruction per cycle, giving it quite good performance for a 4mhz CPU.

pic.twitter.com/pGZaEzo3MT

- foone (@Foone) September 4, 2020

A chemical reaction at the base of everything

IBM's first computer, for its part, had a 4.77 megahertz microprocessor and 16 kilobytes of RAM.

But given the components of the pregnancy test, the latter is probably capable of making sharper calculations faster than those that could be given to the 5150.

But if they are small gems of technology, pregnancy tests cannot do without the paper strip.

It is by urinating on it that a chemical reaction takes place, turning on the device and launching the stones.

If the urine contains traces of chorionic gonadotropic hormone (HCG), it means the person is pregnant.

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