The Age Of Altair

October 21, 2026 by Al Williams 5 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.

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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.

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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.

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Printing A Clock Fit For A Pope

September 17, 2026 by Tyler August 12 Comments

When it comes to clockwork, there is a spectrum — some people love the ticking, and some people hate it, while most fall into the broad middle of indifference. Once upon a time, Pope Alexander VII fell into the “hate it” category, and commissioned a silent timepiece from [Fratelli Campani] in 1656. Three hundred seventy years later, [Many Vices] sought out to re-create the mechanism in extruded plastic thanks to the efforts of watchmaker [Carlo G. Croce], who documented his brass recreation in this PDF file and his own videos.

While the archaeology of recreating the mechanism from old photos is interesting, the mechanism itself is the real showpiece. The secret, as you might be able to tell from the photographs, is an eccentric crank escapement that provides continuous movement rather than the traditional anchor escapement whose periodic movements creates the distinctive ‘tick’ and ‘tock’. [Many] tests both in his video so you can hear the difference and see how much power is wasted with the crank escapement, which doesn’t keep going very long.

We wonder if carefully tuning the flywheel he’s using to match the frequency of the swinging pendulum would help a little there. Likewise, his linear-rail-based spring pendulum modification — though it does look awesome and we’d love a train-themed clock using it — doesn’t come close to providing the runtime of traditional clockwork. That’s probably why the anchor escapement persisted for centuries, even if some people and Popes couldn’t stand the tick-tock.

We’ve featured a lot of different 3D printed clocks, from wholly mechanical to electromechanical digital units to even ones based on D20s , so it’s hard to believe that not much more than a decade back, printing a mechanical clock was considered a challenge. Time marches on whether we can hear it or not.

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Sampling The Elephant’s Foot And Chornobyl’s Tedious Corium Clean-up

September 15, 2026 by Maya Posch 26 Comments

The site of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) remains a unique location, as what’s left of the No. 4 reactor is the only place in the world where you can find significant amounts of what is called corium. An amalgamation of nuclear fuel, fuel rod cladding and whatever materials like concrete that the molten mass came into contact with, Soviet scientists initially struggled to make sense of this material, leading them to even have it shot at to get samples.

In this video documentary by [That Chernobyl Guy] these struggles by scientists both in and outside the USSR to comprehend this wholly new material are detailed. Much like trinitite – created by a US nuclear weapons test – these are amalgamations of material combined under extreme conditions. In the case of the ChNPP accident, the botched turbine spin-up test and disabling of all safeties by the operators allowed the bottom core chain reaction to run unconstrained, producing the massive steam explosion that flipped the biosafety lid of the RBMK reactor, while also fully melting the core material that then melted through the concrete below the reactor.

Although this Elephant’s Foot is only a tiny fraction of the total mass of corium inside the No. 4 reactor, it got rather infamous for supposedly being highly radioactive and lethal. In reality it’s one of the least dangerous parts of the exposed corium, and repeated sampling attempts along with internal degradation due to radioactive decay and weathering before the NSC shelter was installed have led to it mostly turning into slightly radioactive, rusty-looking dust at this point.

Also covered in the video is how the corium in the destroyed reactor is likely to be retrieved for final disposal, with robots cutting into the sides of the reactor building rather than trying to navigate destroyed corridors and staircases. This way it might be possible to remove most of the material without the issues that stymied Soviet engineers in the 1980s during their sampling attempts.

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The Farador Quack Medical Device

August 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 10 Comments

Over the centuries there have been an incredible number of purported medical devices released onto the market, with some having more outrageous claims than others. Released in the 1910s and produced into the 1920s, the Farador electrotherapeutic device claimed to be a thermoelectric device that would cure all disease conditions. In a recent video over at the [Our Own Devices] channel we get an in-depth look at this device and its usage instructions.

It's a thermoelectric generator. Sort of. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube) — It’s a thermoelectric generator. Sort of. (Credit: Our Own Devices, YouTube)

On the Smithsonian’s website you can see the version they’ve got. It’s not identical, but the working principle remains the same — after bypassing the whole ‘is this the right treatment’ questionnaire because it’s a cure-all device, you take the main metal device and its connected electrodes out of the box.

Unlike similar devices of the era that applied an actual electrical current using batteries or similar, this Farador purportedly uses thermoelectric power generation, but there’s no clear hot or cold side to what would be the generator. Despite this, about 20-30 mV can be measured across the electrodes, so surely it’s working?

As it turns out, the Farador is just one of many fake medical devices that cloned the original Electropoise. Naturally such devices have been disassembled by many over the past decades, and as it turns out they are all empty inside, or at least devoid of any mechanisms. Much like many of such fake medical devices today, they mostly bank on the placebo effect. This placebo effect can be so strong that it’s even a confounding factor in real medical trials and medicine.

The more involved and complex the purported medical treatment seems, the stronger the effect tends to be. For the Farador the complex instructions, apparently high-tech thermoelectric generator and such all help to create the illusion and could thus be construed to be the main feature of this product.

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An Early History Of Space Stations: Where’s My Wheel?

August 24, 2026 by Al Williams 27 Comments

Last time we found out the idea of space stations is surprisingly old. By the 1950s, everyone knew we’d be working in beautiful space stations that rotated like a wheel to give us the illusion of gravity. Of course, that didn’t happen. But we did get some practical space stations, even before the current crop. The road to get there, though, was predictably bumpy.

Convair: From TASSEL to MARS

Convair had been studying multi-person orbital stations under Krafft Ehricke since the late 1950s. One result was TASSEL, an acronym for the Three Astronaut Space System Experimental Laboratory. Proposed in 1960, TASSEL was a three-man laboratory intended for an Atlas-Centaur launch into a roughly 200-nautical-mile orbit and missions lasting two or three weeks.

Around the same time, the Air Force asked contractors for proposals for a Military Test Space Station, or MTSS. Convair was one of five companies selected for the study in 1960. The surviving record suggests that Convair’s TASSEL work fed directly into its MTSS proposal.

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