The Time Clock Has Stood The Test Of Time

January 8, 2026 by Kristina Panos 31 Comments

No matter the item on my list of childhood occupational dreams, one constant ran throughout: I saw myself using an old-fashioned punch clock with the longish time cards and everything. I now realize that I have some trouble with the daily transitions of life. In my childish wisdom, I somehow knew that doing this one thing would be enough to signify the beginning and end of work for the day, effectively putting me in the mood, and then pulling me back out of it.

But that day never came. Well, it sort of did this year. I realized a slightly newer dream of working at a thrift store, and they use something that I feel like I see everywhere now that I’ve left the place — a system called UKG that uses mag-stripe cards to handle punches. No it was not the same as a real punch clock, not that I have experience with a one. And now I just want to use one even more, to track my Hackaday work and other projects. At the moment, I’m torn between wanting to make one that uses mag-stripe cards or something, and just buying an old punch clock from eBay.

I keep calling it a ‘punch clock’, but it has a proper name, and that is the Bundy clock. I soon began to wonder how these things could both keep exact time mechanically, but also create a literal inked stamp of said time and date. I pictured a giant date stamper, not giant in all proportions, but generally larger than your average handheld one because of all the mechanisms that surely must be inside the Bundy clock. So, how do these things work? Let’s find out.

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The Rise And Fall Of The In-Car Fax Machines

January 7, 2026 by Lewin Day 52 Comments

Once upon a time, a car phone was a great way to signal to the world that you were better than everybody else. It was a clear sign that you had money to burn, and implied that other people might actually consider it valuable to talk to you from time to time.

There was, however, a way to look even more important than the boastful car phone user. You just had to rock up to the parking lot with your very own in-car fax machine.

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Retrotechtacular: IBM’s The World Of OCR

December 26, 2025 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is that when we point a smartphone camera at some characters it will flawlessly recognize and read them, but OCR technology predates such consumer technology by a considerable amount, with IBM producing OCR systems as early as the 1950s. In a 1960s promotional video on the always delightful Periscope Film channel on YouTube we can get an idea of how this worked back then, in particular the challenge of variable quality input.

What drove OCR was the need to process more paper-based data faster, as the amount of such data increased and computers got more capable. This led to the design of paper forms that made the recognition much easier, as can still be seen today on for example tax forms and on archaic paper payment methods like checks in countries that still use it. This means a paper form optimized for reflectivity, with clearly designated sections and lines, thus limiting the variability of the input forms to be OCR-ed. After that it’s just a matter of writing with clear block letters into the marked boxes, or using a typewriter with a nice fresh ink ribbon.

These days optical scanners are a lot more capable, of course, making many of such considerations no longer as relevant, even if human handwriting remains a challenge for OCR and human brains alike.

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Catching Those Old Busses

December 17, 2025 by Al Williams 30 Comments

The PC has had its fair share of bus slots. What started with the ISA bus has culminated, so far, in PCI Express slots, M.2 slots, and a few other mechanisms to connect devices to your computer internally. But if the 8-bit ISA card is the first bus you can remember, you are missing out. There were practically as many bus slots in computers as there were computers. Perhaps the most famous bus in early home computers was the Altair 8800’s bus, retroactively termed the S-100 bus, but that wasn’t the oldest standard.

There are more buses than we can cover in a single post, but to narrow it down, we’ll assume a bus is a standard that allows uniform cards to plug into the system in some meaningful way. A typical bus will provide power and access to the computer’s data bus, or at least to its I/O system. Some bus connectors also allow access to the computer’s memory. In a way, the term is overloaded. Not all buses are created equal. Since we are talking about old bus connectors, we’ll exclude new-fangled high speed serial buses, for the most part.

Tradeoffs

There are several trade-offs to consider when designing a bus. For example, it is tempting to provide regulated power via the bus connector. However, that also may limit the amount of power-hungry electronics you can put on a card and — even worse — on all the cards at one time. That’s why the S-100 bus, for example, provided unregulated power and expected each card to regulate it.

On the other hand, later buses, such as VME, will typically have regulated power supplies available. Switching power supplies were a big driver of this. Providing, for example, 100 W of 5 V power using a linear power supply was a headache and wasteful. With a switching power supply, you can easily and efficiently deliver regulated power on demand.

Some bus standards provide access to just the CPU’s I/O space. Others allow adding memory, and, of course, some processors only allow memory-mapped I/O. Depending on the CPU and the complexity of the bus, cards may be able to interrupt the processor or engage in direct memory access independent of the CPU.

In addition to power, there are several things that tend to differentiate traditional parallel buses. Of course, power is one of them, as well as the number of bits available for data or addresses. Many bus structures are synchronous. They operate at a fixed speed, and in general, devices need to keep up. This is simple, but it can impose tight requirements on devices.

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A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet

December 15, 2025 by Al Williams 63 Comments

We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But there were still spreadsheets. How far back do they go? Continue reading “A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet” →

Belting Out The Audio

December 8, 2025 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Today, it is hard to imagine a world without recorded audio, and for the most part that started with Edison’s invention of the phonograph. However, for most of its history, the phonograph was a one-way medium. Although early phonographs could record with a separate needle cutting into foil or wax, most record players play only records made somewhere else. The problem is, this cuts down on what you can do with them. When offices were full of typists and secretaries, there was the constant problem of telling the typist what to type. Whole industries developed around that problem, including the Dictaphone company.

The issue is that most people can talk faster than others can write or type. As a result, taking dictation is frustrating as you have to stop, slow down, repeat yourself, or clarify dubious words. Shorthand was one way to equip a secretary to write as fast as the boss can talk. Steno machines were another way. But the dream was always a way to just speak naturally, at your convenience, and somehow have it show up on a typewritten page. That’s where the Dictaphone company started.

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In Praise Of Plasma TVs

November 18, 2025 by Tyler August 42 Comments

I’m sitting in front of an old Sayno Plasma TV as I write this on my media PC. It’s not a productivity machine, by any means, but the screen has the resolution to do it so I started this document to prove a point. That point? Plasma TVs are awesome.

Always the Bridesmaid, Never the Bride

An Egyptian god might see pixels on an 8K panel, but we puny mortals won’t. Image “Horus Eye 2” by [Jeff Dahl]

The full-colour plasma screens that were used as TVs in the 2000s are an awkward technological cul-de-sac. Everyone knows and loves CRTs for the obvious benefits they offer– bright colours, low latency, and scanlines to properly blur pixel art. Modern OLEDs have more resolution than the Eye of Horus, never mind your puny human orbs, and barely sip power compared to their forbearers. Plasma, though? Not old enough to be retro-cool, not new enough to be high-tech, plasma displays are sadly forgotten.

It’s funny, because I firmly believe that without plasma displays, CRTs would have never gone away. Perhaps for that I should hate them, but it’s for the very reasons that Plasma won out over HD-CRTs in the market place that I love them.

What You Get When You Get a Plasma TV

I didn’t used to love Plasma TVs. Until a few years ago, I thought of them like you probably do: clunky, heavy, power-hungry, first-gen flatscreens that were properly consigned to the dustbin of history. Then I bought a house.

The house came with a free TV– a big plasma display in the basement. It was left there for two reasons: it was worthless on the open market and it weighed a tonne. I could take it off the wall by myself, but I could feel the ghost of OSHA past frowning at me when I did. Hauling it up the stairs? Yeah, I’d need a buddy for that… and it was 2020. By the time I was organizing the basement, we’d just gone into lockdown, and buddies were hard to come by. So I put it back on the wall, plugged in my laptop, and turned it on.

I was gobsmacked. It looked exactly like a CRT– a giant, totally flat CRT in glorious 1080p. When I stepped to the side, it struck me again: like a CRT, the viewing angle is “yes”. Continue reading “In Praise Of Plasma TVs” →