Why Engineers Are Forced To Create Junk Designs

November 11, 2026 by Maya Posch 32 Comments

It’s become a bit of a platitude to state that products were manufactured better in ‘the olden days’, but as [The Meandrous Engineer] covers in a recent video essay, the truth is a lot more greyscale and nuanced than something so trite.

The very short version is that it is the dominant culture of a nation in which products are manufactured that determines how many shortcuts and potential product life-shortening decisions are made. This same culture works its way down into company culture, including the engagement of the so-called C-suite with the engineers and folk who keep the now mostly automated manufacturing lines running, as well as vice-versa.

Old-school die-cast models and incandescent light bulbs saw their own series of manufacturing shortcuts, including a pre-World War 2 scandal about the artificial limiting of the lifespan of lightbulbs so that customers would buy more of them. This foreshadows what happened as soon as plastics and computer-aided design and manufacturing came on the scene.

Post-WW2, people like W. Edwards Deming were welcome guests in Japan and other rebuilding nations, introducing the Lean method of manufacturing which was at the time not deemed desirable in a post-war USA. For Japan, South Korea and other nations in the region this meant a boom in manufacturing, with a quality level that would ultimately trounce that of their Western equivalents.

Continue reading “Why Engineers Are Forced To Create Junk Designs” →

The First Business Computer Hits 75!

November 4, 2026 by Jenny List 10 Comments

Many of us will have followed the early history of electronic computing, from the urgent necessities of war, to universities, and then on into the wider world. Most of the firsts in that field are now well known, but there’s one that’s a little obscure. LEO was a commercial development of Cambridge University’s EDSAC that was produced at the behest of J. Lyons and Comapny, one of the UK’s largest mid-20th-century food producers. As such it was the first purpose-built electronic business computer, and since its 75th anniversary is upon us, the Centre for Computing History is holding an event to mark the occasion.

There’s a whole cultural essay to be written about the role of Lyons in twentieth-century Britain, but for Hackaday purposes it should suffice to say that there was little in the way of food production that they didn’t touch. The shops were full of Lyons cakes, biscuits, and tea, and a feature of many towns would have been a Lyons Tea Shop, a budget restaurant. The logistics of such a complex business made a computer of great interest to the company, and after some of its executives learned about ENIAC on a trip to the USA they sought out a machine closer to home. They found the EDSAC, a research computer, and commercialised it as Lyons Electronic Office, or LEO. This spawned a series of machines that lasted into the 1970s, the last one being used by the British Post Office.

It might be difficult to find a LEO in a museum today, but in the National Museum of COmputing at Bletchley you can find the next best thing in their recreation of EDSAC. It’s a decade since we visited, perhaps it’s time for a return.

Header image: Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Replicating The Color-Changing Effect Of The Lycurgus Cup

October 29, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Although most archaeological finds from ancient civilizations aren’t quite as exciting as what you might expect from the movies, occasionally you come across something that’s truly special. The Lycurgus Cup is one of those, with the 3rd or 4th century CE glass cup and its incredible detail surviving likely because it ended up in church treasuries after the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Now its almost magical dichroic glass effect has been recreated in a modern take by researchers at the University of Sheffield.

The Lycurgus cup with light shining through it. (Credit: Chappsnet, Wikimedia)

Dichroic glass takes on a different color depending on the lighting conditions, with the Lycurgus cup appearing to be green glass when lit from the front and red when light passes through it from behind. This serves to give the portrayed scene – of the demise of King Lycurgus from Greek mythology – an extra boost with the right lighting.

The cause of this dichroic effect in this ancient marvel of glass work was unknown for the longest time, but research on a fragment of the glass revealed that it contains nanoparticles of both gold and silver. Since then a number of researchers have recreated this dichroic glass, with [Lars Kool] et al. using FDM 3D printing to create objects embedded with the same nanoparticles that also display this effect.

Where this work by the University of Sheffield differs is in that it creates the effect not only in glass, but also creating a piece of art in the form of a modified Atlas statue to use it. The resulting dichroic effect is rather similar, which isn’t too shocking since unlike over 1,600 years ago we can now literally see and measure nanoparticles in glass, while adding exact amounts of each to pure glass.

Here’s to raising a dichroic glass cup to bridging the millennia with recreated luxury glass recipes.

Where Did Your Mouse Come From?

October 27, 2026 by Jenny List 20 Comments

Many readers will be familiar with Douglas Englebart’s 1968 so-called “Mother of All Demos”, in which he described many of the devices and technologies we would be using two or three decades later. Among these was a primitive computer mouse, but while famous it was by no means the earliest pointing device. At the recent Vintage Computer Festival Berlin, [Dmitriy Kostiuk] delivered a fascinating lecture of the history of the pointing device.

It’s a long video that we’ve placed below, and it’s an exhaustive examination of the topic from the earliest examples to the 1990s when mice became commoditized. It’s a surprise to find that the first pointing device was a trackball built for a 1950s Canadian warship, with a surprisingly modern-looking optical encoder. Englebart’s 1966 wooden block with its pair of wheels and potentiometers had a less-well-known and much more stylish competitor in the same year from Telefunken.

We visit the various design iterations as the form of what we’d call a mouse today took shape. It’s unexpected to find that those Sun mice with the spotty mouse pad weren’t from Sun at all, they were from Mouse Systems. The first mice from Microsoft and Apple make an appearance, as do some awful designs for 8-bit computrs. Remembering those in particular perhaps it’s as well we didn’t have the cash to buy such a disappointing product for ourselves.

The video is long, but interesting. Give it a watch.

Continue reading “Where Did Your Mouse Come From?” →

The Age Of Altair

October 21, 2026 by Al Williams 29 Comments

I recently got the Amazon Christmas toy book in the mail, and it is definitely the modern version of the Sears Christmas Wish Book for last century’s youth. Or at least the majority of last century’s youth. For the true hacker, we had a different set of wishes. Recently, I found something I’ve clung to for over 50 years: the 1975 “The Age of Altair” catalog from MITS. Now that was a wish book!

The poor thing has been dragged around for decades and, I’m sad to say, it looks it. It isn’t totally trash, but I decided I should scan it. Then I realized that Bitsavers has already done it for me and with a much nicer copy, too. The images in this post are from their scan instead.

About the Altair

The magazine that started it all (World Radio History).

If your first computer ran Windows, you might not get the significance of the Altair. Back in 1974, the idea of having your own computer was practically ludicrous. Sure, Radio Electronics had published plans for the Mark 8 in July of that year. But it used an anemic 8008 CPU, and it wasn’t easy to get all the parts you’d need to build one. Other limited computers, like the Kenbak-1 or the occasional surplus minicomputer, ended up in personal hands. But you couldn’t just decide you wanted a real computer, plunk down some money, and have one delivered unless you had extremely deep pockets.

To stay on magazine stands longer, old print mags would come out earlier than their cover date suggested. The January 1975 Popular Electronics arrived, actually, in December of 1974 — just in time for the holidays. It showed a computer you could buy as a kit or assembled: the Altair 8800. Many of us were mesmerized by the idea of owning an actual useful computer.

Continue reading “The Age Of Altair” →

How A British Engineer Homebrewed The Quietest Carbine

October 5, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 31 Comments

Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to “silencers” on firearms. On screen, a suppressed pistol makes a pinging thud, and the bad guy in the next room flops to the floor. Real life is rather less cinematic. A suppressor takes the edge off the report, but it’s by no means quiet or silent. Hence why the term “silencer” is more of a colloquialism, and why “suppressor” is more appropriate.

Every so often, though, someone gets remarkably close to the movie version. The best-known example is probably the De Lisle carbine. A British commando weapon from the Second World War, it was cobbled together from bits and pieces and ended up being a stellar performer in the world of clandestine operations.

Continue reading “How A British Engineer Homebrewed The Quietest Carbine” →

The First Floating Nuclear Power Station

September 21, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 20 Comments

Nuclear power really hit its stride in the 1950s. In the post-war period, there was a rush to develop peaceful uses for splitting the atom, beyond its application as a weapon of war. Soon enough, nuclear reactors were hooking up to power grids and helping propel ships and submarines around the globe.

Eventually, this led to an obvious idea—what if a ship with a reactor could serve as a floating nuclear power station? That question would be answered in the mid-1960s, with an American project of some strategic importance.

Continue reading “The First Floating Nuclear Power Station” →