Cyberdeck Trend Revives the Women Who Wove Apollo’s Memory

A pink seashell purse doubles as an e-reader and talks to a home server. Someone else has woven a Raspberry Pi into a corset, and a third build is a clump of moss and wood that runs old Pokémon games. These are cyberdecks: small handmade computers that women across TikTok and Instagram are building to step outside mass-produced, locked-down gadgets. A cyberdeck is a personal, deliberately impractical machine you can open up, repair, and call your own.

The aesthetic is new, all bedazzled shells and conductive-thread embroidery. The hands-on, woven method underneath has a long history, going back to the women who wove the first computer memory by hand, threading wire through magnetic rings to help steer Apollo to the Moon.

Who Is Building Pink Computers and Why

The scene runs on a handful of makers. CC, who calls herself an “open source baddie,” documents her builds on a blog called Bimbo Tech so other women can follow along even if they don’t yet know what RAM is. She has no software or computer-science background. Her seashell deck is networked to her home servers and a local AI setup, holding her PDFs, books, and notes.

Annike Tan, a 22-year-old Londoner who posts as @ubeboobey, is widely credited with pushing the look into the mainstream with a mermaid deck built into a repurposed clutch, wood, and gilt hardware; her account has drawn more than 230,000 followers. Maro Vardanyan, a blockchain developer, weaves pink Raspberry Pis into purses and corsets she calls “macrame motherboards.” The builds are impractical and personal on purpose, and that is the whole pitch.

“I don’t want Meta AI glasses. I want to pirate books in a tiny embellished shell,” creator Sarahbelle Kim said on TikTok. The builds themselves range from the cozy to the absurd.

From a 1984 Novel to a Raspberry Pi

The word cyberdeck comes from William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, where hackers jacked custom rigs into cyberspace. For decades it stayed fiction. That changed when the Raspberry Pi, a credit-card-sized computer that first sold in 2012 for about $35, gave hobbyists a cheap, programmable brain to build around.

Hardware enthusiasts started sharing homemade decks in niche forums, and over the past few months those communities swelled as women documented their builds step by step, mostly on TikTok, the same app where creators have spent the past year bracing for a possible US ban. There is no spec sheet a deck has to meet. The defining trait is ownership: a machine you can open, understand, and modify, instead of a sealed slab. Gazi Jarin, who wrote a senior essay on Neuromancer, calls her grass deck “a quiet resistance to how polished tech has become.”

The Women Who Wove the First Computer Memory

Vardanyan’s macrame nods to a real history, and it is worth knowing. Before silicon chips stored programs, the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC, the navigation computer aboard the spacecraft) ran on core rope memory. Its software was not loaded onto a chip; it was physically woven into copper wire.

From Textile Mills to Raytheon

At the contractor Raytheon, the work fell to women hired from the textile mills around Waltham, Massachusetts, and from the Waltham Watch Company, chosen for the precision their trade demanded. They threaded sense wires through tiny magnetic rings with hollow needles. As a teardown of how core rope memory stored each bit explains, a wire passing through a ring stored a binary 1 and a wire routed around it stored a 0. That trick packed 192 bits per core, and each finished module took roughly eight weeks and about half a mile of wire.

Engineers nicknamed the method LOL, for Little Old Ladies. The supervisors who oversaw the weave were called rope mothers, among them Margaret Hamilton, the lead software engineer on the program. Some of the era’s chip assembly was also done by Navajo women who hand-assembled semiconductors at a plant in the American Southwest. The gendered labor was not decoration; it was the technical expertise that made the navigation possible.

The Full Circle in Vardanyan’s Weaving

Vardanyan leans into that lineage on purpose, calling her work “crocheting with computers.”

The original processor was handwoven by seamstresses, not by engineers or anybody else. I feel like the hand weaving, and even the fashion-meets-technology, it’s so full circle.

That is Maro Vardanyan, the blockchain developer who builds wearable decks. When men online dismissed her macrame as a waste of a perfectly good board, she points out the boards are sealed in acrylic and wired with conductive thread, so they still function.

Why the Trend Peaked Now

Timing matters here, and two forces converged at once.

A RAM Shortage Born in the AI Boom

The boards at the heart of these builds got expensive fast.

• Sevenfold: the rise in cost over a year for the memory chips used by hobby boards.
• Roughly 83% above its $120 launch price: where the 16GB Pi 5 has climbed, to about $220.
• Three price hikes: raised by the company between December 2025 and April 2026.

The cause sits in the AI build-out. Memory makers are steering capacity toward high-bandwidth chips for data centers, squeezing the cheaper LPDDR4 memory (a low-cost RAM type) that hobby boards rely on. The company’s own notice called the squeeze temporary, with chief executive Eben Upton writing that it looks forward to unwinding the memory-driven price rises once costs stabilize. Building a deck around a thrifted board, rather than buying new, reads as practical now.

Rejecting the Black Box

The other force is fatigue with sealed, surveilled devices. Buy a $1,000 phone and try to modify it, CC notes, and you void the warranty. The makers talk about taking control back and owning a machine outright. Sarahbelle Kim’s line about not wanting Meta AI glasses lands in the same place; smart eyewear, the always-on, camera-forward kind whose rollout keeps slipping as Apple and Meta jockey for the lead, is exactly what many of these builders are opting out of. A handwoven deck is slow and fully visible, and that is the point.

How to Start When You Don’t Know What RAM Is

That phrase, not knowing what RAM is, is CC’s actual benchmark for who her blog is for. The barrier to entry is lower than the polish suggests.

1. Source cheap parts. Thrift stores and eBay carry old boards, small screens, and cables for a few dollars.
2. Pick a brain. A Pi or the smaller Pi Zero handles most builds, and secondhand boards dodge the current price spike.
3. Add a screen and power. A tiny display and a battery pack turn the board into something portable.
4. Choose a vessel. A purse, a shell, a dollhouse, a 3D-printed fossil; the housing is where the personality goes.
5. Follow a maker. Blogs like Bimbo Tech and step-by-step social posts walk you through wiring and software.

Many builds come in under $100 when you salvage parts. CC’s first deck started as a purse. The doubter who told her on Reddit to calm down ended up apologizing and buying the circuit board for her next one.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a cyberdeck?

A cyberdeck is a small, custom-built personal computer, usually based on a single-board computer like the Pi, that the owner can open, repair, and modify. The term covers everything from a handheld e-reader in a seashell purse to a moss-covered box that runs retro games. There is no fixed spec; the point is ownership and personality.

Do you need to know how to code to build one?

No. Several leading builders, including CC of the Bimbo Tech blog, started with no software or computer-science background. Many decks run ready-made operating systems and emulators that need configuring rather than programming, and maker blogs walk beginners through the wiring.

How much does a DIY cyberdeck cost?

Many builds come in under $100 when you use salvaged or thrifted parts. A new board, screen, and battery push that higher, which is why most makers hunt secondhand components on eBay and at thrift stores, especially during the current memory price spike.

Why are the boards harder to get right now?

Memory prices have surged because chipmakers are prioritizing high-bandwidth memory for AI data centers, leaving less capacity for the cheaper chips that hobby boards use. Prices for those chips rose sevenfold in a year, and the 16GB Pi 5 now sells for roughly $220.

Where did the word cyberdeck come from?

The term originated in William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer, where hackers plugged custom machines into a virtual network. Hobbyists adopted the name in the 2010s once cheap single-board computers made homemade rigs possible.

Can a cyberdeck replace a phone or laptop?

Usually not, and that is rarely the goal. Most decks are slow and single-purpose by design, handling tasks like reading, note-taking, or retro gaming. Makers build them to own and understand a device fully, not to match a flagship phone’s speed.