What Can You Run On A 1960s Univac? Anything You’re Willing To Wait For!

April 18, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

There are two UNIVAC 1219B computers that have survived since the 1960s and one of them is even operational. [Nathan Farlow] wanted to run a Minecraft server on it, so he did. After a lot of work, of course, which is described in a detailed blog post, and, a YouTube video by [TheScienceElf] we’ve embedded below.

The UNIVAC is a seriously weird architecture by modern standards: it’s got eighteen-bit words — yeah, not even a power of two — and one’s compliment arithmatic with a weird signed zero thing going on. There’s one 36-bit and one 18-bit register, and only 40,960 words of memory. Eighteen-bit words. Yeah, it was the 1960s and they were making it up as they went along.

[Nathan] wasn’t, entirely, as this weird system is both well-documented and already had an emulator — in BASIC, of all things. [TheScienceElf] used the docs and the existing emulator to recreate his own in Rust so he could test their somewhat crazy plan without wasting cycles on real hardware. The plan? Well, there are really only two options if you want to build modern software for a niche architecture: one is to add niche support to something like GCC, and the other is to write a RISC V emulator and compile to that. We’ve seen that second one before, and that’s the route [Nathan] took.

Of course, [Nathan] is a machine learning guy, so he made the best possible use of LLMs — though it’s interesting to see that unlike Z80 Assembly, Claude Code really couldn’t wrap its virtual head around the UNIVAC’s assembly language, and [Nathan] had to bang out the RISC V emulator himself. Emulator in hand, [Nathan] and friends had code to run on the museum UNIVAC. A single frame of an NES game took 40 minutes, but hey, at least it finished before they got back from lunch.

[TheScienceElf]’s YouTube treatment teases hosting Minecraft, but it wasn’t a full server, just the login portion. That they were able to get TCP/IP over serial and set up a handshake between a 2020s laptop and a 1960s computer is still mighty impressive. Just the work the Vintage Computer Federation put in to get and keep this antique running is mighty impressive all on its own, but it’s wonderful they let people play with it.

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Electric Wind-Up Plane Uses Supercapacitors For Free Flight Fun

April 18, 2026 by Tyler August 21 Comments

There’s something to be said for a simple wind-up, free flight model airplane. With no controls, it must be built very well to fly well, and with only the limited power of a rubber band, it needs a good, high-lift design without much superfluous drag to maximize flight time. There’s also something to be said for modernity though, and prolific hacker [Tom Stanton] puts them together with this supercapacitor plane.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because [Tom] did this before back in 2023. But for that first attempt he converted a commercial R/C toy rather than a plane optimized for low-power free flight. Just like with the best rubber-band machines, his goal for the new production is more flight time than winding time. Plus lots of views on YouTube, but that goes without saying.

Thus this machine is smaller and lighter than the previous iteration. Rather than balsa and tissue like the free-flight aircraft of our youths, [Tom] is using 3D printed plastic for the structure. But he’s got a neat hack built in: he’s printing the wings and control surfaces directly onto tissue paper, eliminating the bonding step. Of course that means his wings are printed flat, but a bit of heat and some bending and he has a single-surface airfoil. Single-surface airfoils are normal in this application, anyway: closed wings add too much weight for too little gain. If you want to try the technique, he’s got files on Printables.

Another interesting factoid [Tom] discovered is that the energy density of supercapacitors decreases sharply below 10 F. As you might imagine by the square-cubed law, bigger is better, but the sharp drop-off dictated he use a single 10 F cap for this build, along with a micro motor. Using the wind-up generator from his previous build, he’s able to get 45 seconds of flight out of just 4 seconds of cranking, a good ratio indeed.

[Tom] seems to like playing with different ways to power his toys; aside from supercapacitors, we’ve also seen him finessing aircraft air motors — including an attempt at a turbine for a model helicopter.

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Haiku Isn’t Just For X86 Anymore, Boots On ARM In QEMU

April 15, 2026 by Tyler August 13 Comments

Ever since it was called OpenBeOS, Haiku has targeted the x86 platform. That makes good sense: it’s hard enough maintaining a niche system on ubiquitous hardware. But x86 isn’t the only game in town anymore. Apple’s doing very well on ARM, Linux runs on oodles of ARM SBCs, and even Windows uh, exists, on that architecture, so why not Haiku? That’s what [smrobtzz] figured, and thanks to his work you can now run Haiku on ARM, in QEMU.

There’s no image available as yet — you still need to bootstrap your own from a working system, and ironically that system cannot be Haiku. [smrobtzz] apparently used MacOS, which makes sense as his ultimate goal is apparently to go where only Aishi Linux has gone before and boot Haiku on his M1 MacBook. There had been previous efforts to get Haiku going on Raspberry Pi hardware, which seems logical considering how lightweight the operating system is, but they’re apparently nowhere near booting either. QEMU is a good start.

Interestingly, according to the ports page, Haiku is “functional” on both RISC V QEMU and the now-discontinued HiFive Unmatched SBC. We don’t seem to have covered it, but that milestone happened five year ago. Given how most RISC V boards currently available are a bit slow for modern desktop Linux, Haiku would likely be a breath of fresh air. The BeOS-descended system might be single user, but it’s snappy.

We reported a couple of years back that Haiku was daily-drivable on x86 ,it’s only gotten better since then, assuming you choose the right hardware. Hardware support is always the hard part about alternative OSes, but Haiku users are absolutely spoiled compared to fans of MorphOS, which still only runs on G4 or G5 PowerPC, and even then not only some hardware.

Hacking Fermentation For Infinite Pickles From Pass-thru Bioreactor

April 15, 2026 by Tyler August 36 Comments

Home-fermented foods are great– they’re healthier, more flavourful, and cheaper than store-bought alternatives. What they aren’t is convenient: you need to prep a big batch of veggies, let it sit, and then you have to store the excess pickles. If you’re not careful, you end up with ancient, over-fermented pickles at the bottom of the crock, or worse– run out of pickles! Surely a fate worse than death. [Cody] at Cody’s Lab has a solution: a continous-flow fermentation process that keeps just the right supply of pickles coming at all times. Our grandmothers who kept a crock for months in the cold room or root cellar might be confused, but this hack brings pickles into the Just-In-Time framework of the 21st century.

Specifically this is for lactic acid fermentation, the type that gets you kosher dills, saurkraut and kimchi along with a whole mess of other tangy, tasty vegetable treats. Vinegar pickles are a whole other thing. It’s done in a brine, as the lactic acid bacteria are salt tolerant in a way that most things that would rot your food and/or make you sick would not. You can reuse the brine over and over, which is what [Cody] is doing: he crafts a U-shaped crock out of old glass bottles and a couple of pickle jars. He cuts the jars into angled pipe segments that are held together with aquarium sealant, which is apparently food safe. It holds water and looks surprisingly good, in that it isn’t hideous.

The bioreactor gets loaded up with veggies on one end, plus lots of salt and spices to taste, plus some cultured brine from an old batch to kickstart everything. The starter isn’t necessary; it just gets things going faster. The initial packing is the hardest: after filling it the first time, one needs only press new veggies in at one end, while removing tasty treats at the other. A special packing tool [Cody]makes helps with that, but he plans on adding a larger feed side. Thanks to that kickstart, the pickles were ready to try after about a week– which means his tube is a bit long, for his desired dwell time. If you like more fermentation to your pickles, then you might like this size.

May be the first time pickles have been featured on Hackaday without turning them into LEDs. We’ve featured plenty of fermentation projects, with automation to help make the best brew or a build for better tempeh, but not a lot of vegetables.

Thanks to [cam72cam] for the tip!

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Four Choppers And A Blimp: The Bizarre Piasecki Helistat

April 14, 2026 by Tyler August 24 Comments

Over two decades after it was last deflated, detached from its gondola, and crated up at Lakehurst, the gas bag of an N-class ZPG-2W blimp was broken out and dusted off for what might have been the most bizarre afterlife in aviation history: as a key building block for the U.S. Forest Service’s Piasecki PA-97 Helistat.

Just look at it! It’s an antique blimp gas bag, four war-surplus helicopters pulled from the boneyard, and a whole maze of aluminum tubing. That the U.S. Forest Service, of all agencies, was the one building what amounts to the airship version of an X-plane is also weird enough to be called bizarre. Getting Frank Piasecki to design this thing, a man who did as much as almost anyone else to kill the airship, might be considered ironic, but to stay on theme, I’ll call it bizarre.

If you’re not already a quadrotor-blimp afficionado, we have some explaining to do.

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They Weren’t Joking: Gentoo WAS Ported To GNU Hurd

April 13, 2026 by Tyler August 46 Comments

Long ago, in the aftermath of the UNIX wars, three kernels emerged from the rubble: BSD, Linux, and Hurd. BSD, being UNIX, was held back by legal wrangling in the aftermath of the wars, and that allowed Linux to pull ahead to a pole position it still enjoys to this day. BSD has its following, of course, but Hurd? GNU Hurd seemed destined to languish… until April 1st, 2026, when the Gentoo Linux distribution was ported to the Free Software Foundation’s kernel.

It turns out, they weren’t actually joking. The joke part was that they were moving fully to the Hurd kernel, away from Linux– you can absolutely still run Gentoo with the Linux kernel, and make no mistake, that’s still the default and best-supported option. Options are good, though, and the Gentoo team has decided that it’s time to add some options to the kernel space, and give the Hurd some time in the sun.

Unlike the Linux kernel, which follows closely the monolithic UNIX framework– and the BSD-Unix kernel, which is Unix–GNU Hurd is a microkernel architecture, based originally on the Mach kernel. In that, it’s rather like MacOS. Unlike MacOS, given its roots in the Free Software Foundation, GNU Hurd is 100% free and open source. There are advantages to a microkernel architecture– it keeps drivers out of kernel space so a dodgy WiFi adapter can’t crash your system, for example– but the big disadvantage is, of course, drivers. Both Linux and BSD drivers can be ported, but that takes work and many of them have not been.

Still, now that Microsoft has become a major contributor to the Linux kernel, we could see a lot of the old-school Linux users who talk about “win-doze” and still spell Microsoft with a dollar sign being tempted to join the Hurd. If that appeals to you and you’re not into Gentoo, Debian has quietly let you install with the Hurd kernel for years now. It’s either that or embrace BSD and escape the chaos vortex.

The big three aren’t the only POSIX kernels out there, of course– there’s even one written entirely in Rust, for the die hard rustaceans amongst you.

ESP32 Weather Display Runs Macintosh System 3

April 13, 2026 by Tyler August 5 Comments

It seems like everybody takes their turn doing an ESP32-based weather display, and why not? They’re cheap, they’re easy, and you need to start somewhere. With the Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) and modules like it, you don’t even need to touch hardware! [likeablob] had the CYD, and he’s showing weather on it, but the Cydintosh is a full Macintosh Plus Emulator running on the ESP32.

The weather app is his own creation, written with the Retro68k cross-compiler, but it looks like something out of the 80s even if it’s getting its data over WiFi. The WiFi connection is, of course, thanks to the whole thing running on an ESP32-S3. Mac Plus emulation comes from [evansm7]’s Micro Mac emulator, the same one that lives inside the RP2040-based PicoMac that we covered some time ago. Obviously [likeablob] has added his own code to get the Macintosh emulator talking to the ESP32’s wireless hardware, with a native application to control the wifi connection in System 3.3. As far as the Macintosh is concerned, commands are passed to the ESP32 via memory address 0xF00000, and data can be read back from it as well. It’s a straightforward approach to allow intercommunication between the emulator and the real world.

The touchpad on the CYD serves as a mouse for the Macintosh, which might not be the most ergonomic given the Macintosh System interface was never meant for touchscreens, but evidently it’s good enough for [likeablob]. He’s built it into a lovely 3D printed case, whose STLs are available on the GitHub repository along with all the code, including the Home Assistant integration.