Bill, Steve, And Gary… Computer Pioneers

September 25, 2023 by 52 Comments

If you ask your neighbor who Bill Gates or Steve Jobs is, they’d probably know. But mention Gary Kildall, and you are likely to get a blank stare unless you live next door to another Hackaday reader. [Al’s Geek Lab] has a great three-part documentary on Gary Kildall who, in case you didn’t know, was the man behind CP/M, a very influential operating system in the early days of computing and one that set the stage for the PC revolution.

You probably know the folktale that when IBM was looking for an operating system, Bill Gates took the meeting, and Gary Kildall went surfing instead. But like most capsule histories, there is plenty more to the story, and it isn’t as simple as people make it out.

We forget, sometimes, how innovative Digital Research — Kildall’s company — was for the time. We think of CP/M as the venerable CP/M 2.2, which was fine. But there was multitasking CP/M and GEM — a precursor to the graphical user interface found everywhere today. Sure, it looks antiquated now, but it was light years in front of everyone else.

If you watch the whole series, you’ll learn that the IBM story isn’t totally apocryphal, but the truth is much different. Kildall didn’t want the IBM deal, and for what seemed like good reasons at the time. Of course, Gates negotiated a deal with IBM that would build a huge company, so it is easy to look back and say that not taking the deal was a mistake, but we would have probably made the same decision as Kildall at that time.

This isn’t the first time we’ve wondered what a world where CP/M won would have looked like. If you want to look inside CP/M, you can. Of course, it still powers many retrocomputers and even has some surprising clones.

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Ballistic BMW Blocks Both Bullets And Booms

September 21, 2023 by 47 Comments

Maybe you like to live dangerously. Like, James Bond dangerously. Well, we won’t judge, but we will pass this along — BMW has created the ultimate driving machine for shootouts and war zones.

Rather than having aftermarket anti-ballistic bits and bobs attached at a later date, this BMW 7 Series is born anti-ballistic and explosion-resistant, built from the ground up with armor steel. They call this the BMW Protection Core.

By building it this way, there are many advantages like more cabin space, lower curb weight, and better handling, which is exactly what you’d want if you were under these types of attacks.

For starters, the car has chunkier A-pillars and door/window frames meant to withstand the damage pictured here. The car has special armoring in the roof and undercarriage to withstand explosions. And the fuel tank is self-sealing, so you have a chance at getting out of there if the thing takes a bullet.

Can’t afford this ballistic-grade beast? You could always roll your own armored vehicle.

Books You Should Read: David Macaulay’s Architecture Series

September 21, 2023 by 31 Comments

For a lot of us, there’s a bright line separating the books we enjoyed as children from the “real” books of our more mature years. We all eventually age out of the thin, brightly illustrated picture books we enjoyed in our youth, replacing them with thicker, wordier volumes with fewer and fewer illustrations, until they become so dense with information that footnotes and appendices are needed to convey all the information, and a well-written index is a vital necessity to make use of any of it.

Such books seem like a lot less fun than kids’ books, and they probably are, but most of us adjust to the change and accept the fact that the children’s section of the library doesn’t hold much that’ll interest us anymore. But not all the books that get a “JUV” label on their spines are created equal. Some are far more than picture books, even if the pictures are the main attraction. The books of British-born American author David Macaulay come to mind, particularly the books comprising his Architecture Series.

Macaulay’s books were enormously influential in developing my engineering sensibilities, and are still a pleasure to thumb through these many years later. I still learn something about the history of construction and engineering when I pull one of these books off the shelf, which makes them Books You Should Read.

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3D Printing A Sock Knitting Machine

September 12, 2023 by 33 Comments

3D printing socks isn’t really a thing yet. You’d end up with scratchy plastic garments that irritate your feet no end. You can easily 3D print all kinds of nifty little mechanisms, though, so why not 3D print yourself a machien to knit some socks instead? That’s precisely what [Joshua De Lisle] did.

The sock knitting machine is a simple device, albeit one that takes up most of the build area on a common 3D printer. It’s properly known as a circular sock machine, and is capable of producing the comfortable tubular socks that we’re all familiar with. All it takes is a bit of yarn and a simple handcranking of the mechanism, and it’s capable of extruding a sock before your very eyes.

He steps through his various iterative design improvements, and shows us how to build the device using knitting machine hooks to handle the yarn directly. The device is also instrumented with a digital counter to keep track of how far along your given sock is.

Your friends at the pub might go running for the doors when you start explaining that you’re thinking about making your own socks. Don’t let them deter you; we’ve seen others tread this path before. Video after the break.

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Industrial Surge Protector Teardown

September 10, 2023 by 12 Comments

Surge protectors are a common item in the modern household, but the Meanwell unit that [Big Clive] tears apart was clearly intended for commercial use. In fact, he mentions it was made for outdoor signage. Removing the rear panel didn’t help much — the entire unit was potted in resin — but that didn’t stop [Clive]. Removing the resin revealed only a few components surrounded by a sand-like substance.

There’s no circuit board inside. Components are just wired together before potting. The significant player inside is a metal oxide varistor with a thermal fuse. [Clive] draws out a schematic, which is deceptively simple. The two LEDs are an older style of green LED, and he explains why the choice of LED is important in this application. In typical operation, the LEDs light. If a fuse blows, at least one of the LEDs will extinguish.

Not all useful circuits have to be complicated. This is an excellent example of how a simple but well-constructed design can succeed commercially.

Not all surge protectors are built this well. If you need a refresher on how varistors work, we can help with that.

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Clean Water, From A Plant-Based Filter

September 9, 2023 by 20 Comments

If you’re an outdoors person, one of the earliest things you learned was probably that in-field water sources can’t always be trusted as drinkable. A clear mountain stream could have a dead sheep in it just upstream, for example. Maybe you learned to boil it, or perhaps add chemical tablets. Up-to-date campers have a range of filters at their disposal thanks to nanotechnology, but such devices aren’t the only options to avoid sickness. [BeraAjan] has built one using plant xylem.

The inspiration for this filter came from an MIT paper, and the plant xylem in question isn’t the thin layer we were expecting but a far thicker one found in young conifer branches. In fact, the whole twig without its bark is placed in a tube, and the water filters through it.

It’s fair to say that this isn’t the fastest of filters though, as you can see in the video below the break. He’s combined a few individual filters, but maybe it’s not for the easily bored.

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Bespoke Implants Are Real—if You Put In The Time

September 6, 2023 by 23 Comments

A subset of hackers have RFID implants, but there is a limited catalog. When [Miana] looked for a device that would open a secure door at her work, she did not find the implant she needed, even though the lock was susceptible to cloned-chip attacks. Since no one made the implant, she set herself to the task. [Miana] is no stranger to implants, with 26 at the time of her talk at DEFCON31, including a couple of custom glowing ones, but this was her first venture into electronic implants. Or electronics at all. The full video after the break describes the important terms.

The PCB antenna in an RFID circuit must be accurately tuned, which is this project’s crux. Simulators exist to design and test virtual antennas, but they are priced for corporations, not individuals. Even with simulators, you have to know the specifics of your chip, and [Miana] could not buy the bare chips or find a datasheet. She bought a pack of iCLASS cards from the manufacturer and dissolved the PVC with acetone to measure the chip’s capacitance. Later, she found the datasheet and confirmed her readings. There are calculators in lieu of a simulator, so there was enough information to design a PCB and place an order.

The first batch of units can only trigger the base station from one position. To make the second version, [Miana] bought a Vector Network Analyzer to see which frequency the chip and antenna resonated. The solution to making adjustments after printing is to add a capacitor to the circuit, and its size will tune the system. The updated design works so a populated board is coated and implanted, and you can see an animated loop of [Miana] opening the lock with her bare hand.

Biohacking can be anything from improving how we read our heart rate to implanting a Raspberry Pi.

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