Picture this: it’s January 19th, 2038, at exactly 03:14:07 UTC. Somewhere in a data center, a Unix system quietly ticks over its internal clock counter one more time. But instead of moving forward to 03:14:08, something strange happens. The system suddenly thinks it’s December 13th, 1901. Chaos ensues.
Welcome to the Year 2038 problem. It goes by a number of other fun names—the Unix Millennium Bug, the Epochalypse, or Y2K38. It’s another example of a fundamental computing limit that requires major human intervention to fix.
For a brief, buzzing moment in 1983, the Coleco Adam looked like it might out-64 the Commodore 64. Announced with lots of ambition, this 8-bit marvel promised a complete computing package: a keyboard, digital storage, printer, and all for under $600. An important fact was that it could morph your ColecoVision into a full-fledged CP/M-compatible computer. So far this sounds like a hacker’s dream: modular, upgradeable, and… misunderstood.
The reality was glorious chaos. The Adam used a daisy-wheel printer as a power supply (yes, really), cassettes that demagnetized themselves, and a launch delayed into oblivion. Yet beneath the comedy of errors lurked something quite tempting: a Z80-based system with MSX-like architecture and just enough off-the-shelf parts to make clone fantasies plausible. Developers could have ported MSX software in weeks. Had Coleco shipped stable units on time, the Adam might well have eaten the C64’s lunch – while inspiring a new class of hybrid machines.
Instead, it became a collector’s oddball. But for the rest of us, it is a retro relic that invites us to ponder – or even start building: what if modular computing had gone mainstream in 1983?
Long before electricity was a common household utility, humanity had been building machines to do many tasks that we’d now just strap a motor or set of batteries onto and think nothing of it. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and essentially everything had non-electric analogs, and perhaps surprisingly, there were mechanical computers as well. Electronics-based computers are far superior in essentially every way, but the aesthetics of a mechanical computer are still unmatched, like this 8-bit machine built from K’nex.
In this series of three videos, [Piers] runs us through what a software defined ROM is, how to make them, and then how to use them.
As [Piers] explains, one frustration a retro technician will face is a failed ROM chip. In the era he’s interested in, there are basically three relevant kinds of ROM chip, all 24-pin Dual Inline Package (DIP):
The documentary covers the life of the Apple Lisa. It starts with the genesis of the Lisa Project at Apple, covering its creation, then its marketing, and finally its cancellation. It then discusses the Apple Lisa after Apple, when it became a collectible. Finally the film examines the legacy of the Apple Lisa, today.
The Apple Lisa was an important step on the journey to graphical user interfaces which was a paradigm that was shifting in the early 1980s, contemporary with the Macintosh and the work at Palo Alto. The mouse. Bitmapped graphics. Friendly error messages. These were the innovations of the day.
When buying used cars there are plenty of ways to check on their history. In many countries there are systems, like Carfax for parts of North America and Europe, that can provide crash history in some situations and alert a potential buyer of hidden damage. Not so for computers, where anyone can run an intensive mining, gaming, rendering, or AI application for years on hardware which might not otherwise show any outward signs of heavy use. And that’s just for hard use; there’s all kinds of other ways of damaging hardware. HP is hoping to solve this problem with a PC history report of sorts.
Aimed at the enterprise or business arena, where companies tend to follow replacement schedules for laptops and other hardware which might get discarded before reaching a true end-of-life, HP is suggesting adding a data recorder at the firmware level of some computers. This software would monitor the computer’s temperatures, SSD wear, and other telematics on the computer and store a record that could be viewed by a potential buyer when the IT department is ready to take them out of service. And, since it’s 2025, HP is also claiming that this system needs and uses an AI of some sort.
Although HP is billing this as a way to improve sustainability and limit e-waste, we’d theorize that even with a report like this available, the economic gain of a program like this would be marginal at best. While the idea of giving each decommissioned laptop a clean bill of health is noble, it’s hard to imagine overworked IT staff carefully curating device histories when most used enterprise machines are already sold by the pallet.
[Sylvain Fortin] recently wrote in to tell us about his Homebrew CPU Project, and the story behind this one is truly remarkable.
He began working on this toy CPU back in 1994, over thirty years ago. After learning about the 74LS181 ALU in college he decided to build his own CPU. He made considerable progress back in the 90s and then shelved the project until the pandemic hit when he picked it back up again and started adding some new features. A little later on, a board house approached him with an offer to cover the production cost if he’d like to redo the wire-wrapped project on a PCB. The resulting KiCad files are in the GitHub repository for anyone who wants to play along at home.
An early prototype on breadboard
The ALU on [Sylvain]’s CPU is a 1-bit ALU which he describes as essentially a selectable gate: OR, XOR, AND, NOT. It requires more clock steps to compute something like an addition, but, he tells us, it’s much more challenging and interesting to manage at the microcode level. On his project page you will find various support software written in C#, such as an op-code assembler and a microcode assembler, among other things.
For debugging [Sylvain] started out with das blinkin LEDs but found them too limiting in short order. He was able to upgrade to a 136 channel Agilent 1670G Benchtop Logic Analyzer which he was fortunate to score for cheap on eBay. You can tell this thing is old from the floppy drive on the front panel but it is rocking 136 channels which is seriously OP.
The PCB version is a great improvement but we were interested in the initial wire-wrapped version too. We asked [Sylvain] for photos of the wire-wrapping and he obliged. There’s just something awesome about a wire-wrapped project, don’t you think? If you’re interested in wire-wrapping check out Wire Wrap 101.
