Requiem For Long Wave, As The BBC Goes Silent

June 27, 2026 by Jenny List 1 Comment

Something happened this morning which will have been unnoticed by many, but which for a certain breed of radio enthusiast marks the end of an era. The BBC stopped broadcasting Radio 4 on their 198 kHz Long Wave frequency, ending over a century of transmission in the band. For now the transmitter carries a recorded message telling listeners that the service has ended, but it’s expected that this will soon be turned off.

A pair of very large transmitting masts against a cloudy grey sky. — The main 198kHz BBC transmitter, at Droitwich. Bob Nienhuis, Public domain.

American readers may be unfamiliar with Long Wave as it’s a band not allocated in their region. Covering 153 to 279 kHz, it’s a relic from the earliest days of high-power broadcasting in the 1920s, used because of the enormous distances that could be covered with its lower frequencies. The main long wave transmitter for the BBC is at Droitwich, and its demise comes because there are no more spares for its high-power transmitter tubes. It joins many Medium Wave, or AM, as it is commonly known, stations in leaving the airwaves, as increased interference from switch mode electronics and the availability of higher quality alternatives took away their listeners. It’s fair to say that there will be few whose lives are inconvenienced by the switch-off in 2026, but it’s worth taking a moment to remember.

The first BBC Long Wave transmissions in the mid-1920s were on a 1600 metre wavelength, or 187.5 kHz. A series of international agreements saw them move to 193 kHz, and then 200 KHz or 1500 metres in 1934. They stayed on that frequency until another shift down 2 KHz to 198 kHz in 1988. They were atomic-controlled, and thus usable as a frequency standard. The programming started with station names redolent of their era, first the BBC National Service, then the Light Programme you’ll see on the dial in the header image, and finally the more modern-sounding Radio 4. A famous BBC programme tied to Long Wave is the Shipping Forecast, a weather bulletin for deep-sea fishermen which became cult listening on land and now features on FM and digital services too, and there’s even a probably-apocryphal tale that British nuclear submarine captains would once use its presence or absence to judge whether nuclear war had occurred.

In an Oxfordshire farmhouse not far short of fifty years ago, a young child who would later become a Hackaday writer heard a radio show like nothing before, which made an impression that continues to this day. The show was one of the earliest airings of the original Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy radio series, through a 1970s ITT radio tuned to BBC Radio 4 on (then) 200 kHz Long Wave. So long, Droitwich, and thanks for all the fish.

The Trains With Rubber Tires

June 24, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 33 Comments

The train was one of the game-changing inventions that defined the Industrial Age. No more would humanity rely on tempestuous animals to haul goods and passengers great distances across the land. Fire and steam came along to rapidly increase the speed of travel and transformed the very fabric of society itself.

To this day, the vast majority of train networks rely on the same basic principle—heavy locomotives and carriages running steel wheels on steel tracks. Yet, there is a curious alternative twist on this concept that sees trains of carriages riding on tires instead. But what would possess anyone to build a rubber tired train?

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A Brief History Of Unix Commands On Windows: CoreUtils (Again)

June 16, 2026 by Al Williams 17 Comments

If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, Unix/Linux and Windows lived on opposite sides of a cultural border. Unix people had pipes, small composable tools, shell scripts, make, sed, awk, grep, tar, and the idea that everything was a file. Windows people had drive letters, backslashes, COMMAND.COM or cmd.exe, and an API that did not care much about what POSIX thought.

Yet there has always been a demand for Unix tools on Windows. Some of it came from programmers who wanted the same build scripts everywhere. Some came from administrators who missed grep and awk. Some came from companies trying to port big Unix applications to NT without rewriting them all. The result is a long, strange history of Unix-on-Windows layers, toolkits, compromises, and almost-but-not-quite compatibility.

Easy?

The simplest version of the problem sounds trivial. How hard can cat be? Open a file, copy bytes to standard output, done. Writing ls is a little more work, but Windows has directory APIs. Common commands like cp, mv, rm, mkdir are not very mysterious. Even pipes are not foreign to Windows. A lot of the everyday Unix command set can be ported as ordinary Win32 console programs with some path handling and enough patience.

But not all of Unix or Linux translates cleanly to Windows. The big issue is fork(). On Unix, a process can clone itself. The child gets a copy of the parent’s address space, open file descriptors, environment, signal state, and so on. Modern kernels make this efficient with copy-on-write memory, but the programming model is old and deeply baked into Unix. Shells use it constantly. Servers use it. Build systems use it. Scripting languages assume it exists, or at least that the surrounding environment behaves as though it does.

Windows process creation is different. Windows has CreateProcess(), which starts a new program. That is a perfectly reasonable model, but it is not fork() (more like fork()+exec()). If you are just launching notepad.exe, no problem. If you are trying to implement a POSIX shell that forks, redirects file descriptors, adjusts the environment, and then starts another program, the mismatch is extreme and you’ll have to do some strange things to fake things out.

One of the early commercial answers was the MKS Toolkit, originally from Mortice Kern Systems. MKS gave Windows users a pile of familiar commands, shells, and development tools. It was not just ls and friends; it included things like ksh, vi, grep, find, awk, make, and many of the utilities needed to move scripts and build procedures between Unix and Windows. The current PTC MKS documentation still describes it in exactly that spirit: Unix shells and hundreds of commands for interoperability with Windows.

MKS was attractive because it treated Windows as Windows. You were not necessarily pretending your machine was a Unix workstation. You were getting a Unix-flavored toolbox that could operate in a Windows environment. For many people, that was enough. You could write scripts, process text, drive builds, and avoid learning three different syntaxes for the same job.

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A Peek Inside The Secret Lagercrantz Suitcase Radio

June 12, 2026 by Al Williams 7 Comments

What counts as portable is somewhat a matter of opinion, especially over the years. [Helge Fykse] has a portable spy radio of Swedish origin. For its time, it was considered very portable, crammed into a good-sized suitcase.

You can see the large crystal that sets the transmit frequency and a key to send Morse code. The receiver has a VFO, so it was more agile. Based on the regenerative knob, it appears the receiver was of the regenerative type. The suitcase had its own battery, and with tubes, it could probably put out some kind of signal if connected to anything metal, like bedsprings, a clothesline, or anything. There was a lightbulb to let you see when you were transmitting maximum power.

Speaking of tubes, there were five inside, two for the transmitter and three for the receiver. The radio had storage for spare tubes, and the agent could maintain the radio in the field.

You not only get a peek inside the suitcase, but a look at the schematic. The radio is a model of simplicity, but we are certain it did its job.

We love looking at exotic spy gear, especially radios.

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Powering Up A Pluggable Module From The 1948 IBM 604 Electronic Calculator

June 8, 2026 by Maya Posch 4 Comments

In that awkward transition phase between electromechanical accounting systems used in the 1940s and the introduction of fully digital computers we find systems such as the IBM 604 Electronic Calculator, advertised for accounting, calculating and engineering tasks. While not capable of complex instructions, loops and other advanced features, it did use an interesting modular architecture with easily swappable modules containing a vacuum tube and associated components. Recently [Ken Shirriff] took a poke at one of these and even powered it up.

This kind of pluggable system would become a staple of computer systems, as they enabled the use of modules or cards with specific functions that could be swapped and combined at will to increase system flexibility, lower costs and make repairs a snap. For the IBM 604 a total of about 1250 vacuum tubes were used, apparently all of which were found on these pluggable modules.

The module that [Ken] got his hands on has a thyratron tube, which is effectively a high current switch and rectifier. In the short demonstration video you can see it being used to switch a lamp on and off, with further details explained in the article.

Despite being rather limited in its functionality and limited by the punch card input and output speed, the IBM 604 was still a smashing commercial success with over 5600 units produced. A transistorized prototype version with 2200 transistors and 95% less power usage was created in 1954 that formed the basis for the IBM 608, the world’s first commercial all-transistorized calculator.

The 608 didn’t last too long, however, as at that point the breakneck pace of semiconductor technology meant that any newly released product was already obsolete by the time it hit the market. Despite this, fundamentals like pluggable modules would keep showing up over and over, ranging from the 1950s Bendix G-15 to even modern day systems, including PCs with pluggable RAM and expansion cards as well as mainframes where hot swapping of even entire CPU modules is just another feature.

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Remember When Flash Drives Were Going To Make Your PC Faster?

May 26, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 47 Comments

The 2000s was a decade of great change in the computer industry. The world had grown accustomed to corruptible floppy disks, blue screens of death, and achingly slow load times. In a few short years, all of that would change, as USB drives, better operating systems, and faster processors brought forth a new age of stability and speed.

Amidst this era of upheaval, Microsoft introduced a new technology. It was intended to increase performance on the cheap to a new generation of machines, but it would turn out to be little more than a gimmick that never really caught on. Let’s explore the easily-forgotten legacy of ReadyBoost.

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The Email Of The Future In 1986

May 24, 2026 by Jenny List 26 Comments

With so many online messaging services to choose from it’s almost as though the daddy of them all, email, has faded into the background as something you only use for more formal contacts. But it’s still the underpinning of much of the business world’s electronic communication and is likely to stay so for the foreseeable future. The BBC Archive takes us back to a time when email was relatively new, when in 1986 [Lesley Judd] takes a very chunky 1980s laptop on a plane from London to the Netherlands, and sends an email to her colleague at home using a payphone and an acoustic coupler.

There are so many of-their-era quirks in this film it’s difficult to pick, but little things like the aircraft still having smoking and non-smoking areas, there being no sign of a mobile telephone, or the payphone operating in Guilders rather than Euros make it from a different time. Perhaps most interesting though is the email system in use, because this isn’t an internet based service. Instead it’s using Telecom Gold, which was the UK telco BT’s online service offering to businesses, and part of the international Dialcom network. This was a commercial service which hung on until some time in the 1990s when the Internet finally displaced it.

The British writer L. P. Hartley used the phrase “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there” as the opening sentence of one of his books, and the film below the break certainly brings that to mind. It’s a time that’s within reach, yet the changes in information technology over even the next decade or so would make the tech depicted not just obsolete but almost unrecognizable. Most of us today could sit at a 1996 laptop and send an email, but few of us would be as immediately at home with Telecom Gold.

It’s still possible to use an acoustic coupler today though.

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