What’s New, From 1927

January 2, 2023 by Jenny List 13 Comments

Here we are at the start of the new year, which for the Internet Archive means a note about what has just entered the public domain. 1927’s finest previously copyrighted materials are now up for grabs in the public domain, which means there’s a treasure trove of films, books, and music to freely copy and remix.

Their article highlights a few notable pieces of 1927’s popular culture , of which we suggest you should definitely take note of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis if you have any interest in sci-fi, but for Hackaday readers there’s not much else in the article itself relating to technology. Delving into the archive for 1927 is still a fascinating pastime though, because beyond the interest of seeing what’s now free it led onto what was the state of technology in the 1920s. And here we find ourselves as much navigating the English language as we do the library itself, because so much of what we do uses vocabulary from the decades since. Continue reading “What’s New, From 1927” →

BBC World Service Turns 90

December 22, 2022 by Al Williams 23 Comments

If you’ve ever owned a shortwave radio, you’ve probably listened at least a little to the BBC World Service. After all, they are a major broadcasting force, and with the British Empire or the Commonwealth spanning the globe, they probably had a transmitter close to your backyard. Recently, the BBC had a documentary about their early years of shortwave broadcasting. It is amazing both because it started so simply and when you think how far communications have progressed in just a scant 100 years.

Today, the BBC World Service broadcasts in over 40 languages distributing content via radio, TV, satellite, and the Internet. Hard to imagine it started with four people who were authorized to spend 10 pounds a week.

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A Love Letter To My Lost Amiga

December 20, 2022 by Jenny List 140 Comments

My first love was a black wedge. It was 1982, and I had saved up to buy a Sinclair ZX81. That little computer remains the only one of the huge number that I have owned over the years about which I can truly say that I understood its workings completely; while I know how the i7 laptop on which this is being written works I can only say so in a loose way as it is an immensely complex device.

Computing allegiance is fickle, and while I never lost an affection for the little Sinclair I would meet my true electronic soulmate around eight years later as an electronic engineering student. It no longer graces my bench, but this was the computer against which all subsequent machines I have owned would be measured, the one which I wish had not been taken from me before its time, and with which I wish I could have grown old together. That machine was a Commodore Amiga, and this is part love letter, part wistful musing about what could have been, and part rant about what went wrong for the best desktop computer platform ever made. Continue reading “A Love Letter To My Lost Amiga” →

Gift Idea From 1969: A Kitchen Computer

December 6, 2022 by Al Williams 51 Comments

The end of the year is often a time for people to exchange presents and — of course — the rich want to buy each other the best presents. The Neiman Marcus company was famous for having a catalog of gift ideas. Many were what you’d consider normal gifts, but there were usually extreme ones, like a tank trunk filled with 100,000 gallons of cologne. One year, the strange gift was an authentic Chinese junk complete with sails and teak decks. They apparently sold three at $11,500 (in 1962 money, no less). Over the top? In 1969, they featured a kitchen computer.

Wait a minute! In 1969, computers were the purview of big companies, universities, and NASA, right? Well, not really. By that time, some industrial minicomputers were not millions of dollars but were still many thousands of dollars. The price in the catalog for the kitchen computer was $10,600. That’s about $86,000 in today’s money. The actual machine was a Honeywell 316, based on one of the computers that helped run the early Internet.

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Ask Hackaday: When It Comes To Processors, How Far Back Can You Go?

December 1, 2022 by Jenny List 89 Comments

When it was recently announced that the Linux kernel might drop support for the Intel 486 line of chips, we took a look at the state of the 486 world. You can’t buy them from Intel anymore, but you can buy clones, which are apparently still used in embedded devices. But that made us think: if you can’t buy a genuine 486, what other old CPUs are still in production, and which is the oldest?

Defining A Few Rules

An Intel 4004 microprocessor in ceramic packaging — The daddy of them all, 1972’s Intel 4004 went out of production in 1981. Thomas Nguyen, CC BY-SA 4.0

There are a few obvious contenders that immediately come to mind, for example both the 6502 from 1975 and the Z80 from 1976 are still readily available. Some other old silicon survives in the form of cores incorporated into other chips, for example the venerable Intel 8051 microcontroller may have shuffled off this mortal coil as a 40-pin DIP years ago, but is happily housekeeping the activities of many far more modern devices today. Still further there’s the fascinating world of specialist obsolete parts manufacturing in which a production run of unobtainable silicon can be created specially for an extremely well-heeled customer. Should Uncle Sam ever need a crate of the Intel 8080 from 1974 for example, Rochester Electronics can oblige.

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How To Repair? The Death Of Schematics

November 21, 2022 by Al Williams 97 Comments

There was a time when, if you were handy with a soldering iron, you could pretty easily open up a radio or TV repair business. You might not get rich, but you could make a good living. And if you had enough business savvy to do sales too, you could do well. These days there aren’t many repair shops and it isn’t any wonder. The price of labor is up and the price of things like TVs drops every day. What’s worse is today’s TV is not only cheaper than last year’s model, but probably also better. Besides that, TVs are full of custom parts you can’t get and jam-packed into smaller and smaller cases.

Case in point, I saw a “black Friday” ad for a 40-inch 1080p flatscreen with a streaming controller for $98. Granted, that’s not huge by today’s standards and I’m sure it isn’t a perfect picture. But for $98? Even a giant high-quality TV these days might cost a bit more than $1,000 and you can get something pretty great for well under $500.

Looking back, a Sears ad showed a great deal on a 19″ color TV in 1980. The price? $399. That doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that today that would be about $1,400. So with a ratio of about 3.5 to 1, a $30/hour service call would be, today, $105. So for an hour’s service call with no parts, I could just buy that 40″ TV. Add even one simple part or another hour and I’m getting close to the big league TVs.

Did you ever wonder how TV repair technicians knew what to do? Well, for one thing, most of the time you didn’t have to. A surprising number of calls would be something simple like a frayed line cord or a dirty tuner. Antenna wires destroyed by critters was common enough. In the tube days, you could pretty easily swap tubes to fix the bulk of actual problems.

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TV Repair By Mail

November 17, 2022 by Al Williams 49 Comments

I don’t think there was ever a correspondence school called the “Close Cover Before Striking School” but since book matches — which used to be a thing when most people smoked — always had that text on them anyway perhaps there should have been. There was a time when electronic magazines, billboards, and even book matches were constantly bombarding us with ads to have a career in electronics. Or computers. Or TV repair. So while we think of distance learning as a new idea, really it is just the evolution of these old correspondence schools which date back quite some time.

How far exactly? Hard to say. There’s evidence of some distance learning going back as far as 1728. In 1837, there was a correspondence course to learn shorthand. By 1858, the University of London started its external program for correspondence work and the University of Chicago had a home study division in 1892. Radio was an early choice of topic, too. In the United States, the United Wireless Telegraph company started a training school — later the Marconi Institute — in 1909. However, it is doubtful that there was any correspondence training going on there until much later.

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