Australia Didn’t Invent WiFi, Despite What You’ve Heard

August 20, 2024 by Lewin Day 61 Comments

Wireless networking is all-pervasive in our modern lives. Wi-Fi technology lives in our smartphones, our laptops, and even our watches. Internet is available to be plucked out of the air in virtually every home across the country. Wi-Fi has been one of the grand computing revolutions of the past few decades.

It might surprise you to know that Australia proudly claims the invention of Wi-Fi as its own. It had good reason to, as well— given the money that would surely be due to the creators of the technology. However, dig deeper, and you’ll find things are altogether more complex.

Continue reading “Australia Didn’t Invent WiFi, Despite What You’ve Heard” →

For years, the first Air Force One sat neglected and forgotten in an open field at Arizona’s Marana Regional Airport. (Credit: Dynamic Aviation)

The First Air Force One And How It Was Nearly Lost Forever

August 17, 2024 by Maya Posch 14 Comments

Although the designation ‘Air Force One’ is now commonly known to refer to the airplane used by the President of the United States, it wasn’t until Eisenhower that the US President would make significant use of a dedicated airplane. He would have a Lockheed VC-121A kitted out to act as his office as commander-in-chief. Called the Columbine II after the Colorado columbine flower, it served a crucial role during the Korean War and would result the coining of the ‘Air Force One’ designation following a near-disaster in 1954.

This involved a mix-up between Eastern Air Lines 8610 and Air Force 8610 (the VC-121A). After the Columbine II was replaced with a VC-121E model (Columbine III), the Columbine II was mistakenly sold to a private owner, and got pretty close to being scrapped.

In 2016, the plane made a “somewhat scary and extremely precarious” 2,000-plus-mile journey to Bridgewater, Virginia, to undergo a complete restoration. (Credit: Dynamic Aviation)

Although nobody is really sure how this mistake happened, it resulted in the private owner stripping the airplane for parts to keep other Lockheed C-121s and compatible airplanes flying. Shortly before scrapping the airplane, he received a call from the Smithsonian Institution, informing him that this particular airplane was Eisenhower’s first presidential airplane and the first ever Air Force One. This led to him instead fixing up the airplane and trying to sell it off. Ultimately the CEO of the airplane maintenance company Dynamic Aviation, [Karl D. Stoltzfus] bought the partially restored airplane after it had spent another few years baking in the unrelenting sun.

Although in a sorry state at this point, [Stoltzfus] put a team led by mechanic [Brian Miklos] to work who got the airplane in a flying condition by 2016 after a year of work, so that they could fly the airplane over to Dynamic Aviation facilities for a complete restoration. At this point the ‘nuts and bolts’ restoration is mostly complete after a lot of improvisation and manufacturing of parts for the 80 year old airplane, with restoration of the Eisenhower-era interior and exterior now in progress. This should take another few years and another $12 million or so, but would result in a fully restored and flight-worthy Columbine II, exactly as it would have looked in 1953, plus a few modern-day safety upgrades.

Although [Stoltzfus] recently passed away unexpectedly before being able to see the final result, his legacy will live on in the restored airplane, which will after so many years be able to meet up again with the Columbine III, which is on display at the National Museum of the USAF.

A Modern Take On An Old Language

August 16, 2024 by Al Williams 44 Comments

Some old computer languages are destined to never die. They do, however, evolve. For example, Fortran, among the oldest of computer languages, still has adherents, not to mention a ton of legacy code to maintain. But it doesn’t force you to pretend you are using punched cards anymore. In the 1970s, if you wanted to crunch numbers, Fortran was a good choice. But there was another very peculiar language: APL. Turns out, APL is alive and well and has a thriving community that still uses it.

APL has a lot going for it if you are crunching serious numbers. The main data type is a multidimensional array. In fact, you could argue that a lot of “modern” ideas like a REPL, list types, and even functional programming entered the mainstream through APL. But it did have one strange thing that made it difficult to use and learn.

[Kenneth E. Iverson] was at Harvard in 1957 and started working out a mathematical notation for dealing with arrays. By 1960, he’d moved to IBM and a few years later wrote a book entitled “A Programming Language.” That’s where the name comes from — it is actually an acronym for the book’s title. Being a mathematician, [Iverson] used symbols instead of words. For example, to create an array with the numbers 1 to 5 in it and then print it, you’d write:

⎕←⍳5

Since modern APL has a REPL (read-eval-print loop), you could remove the box and the arrow today.

What Key Was That?

Wait. Where are all those keys on your keyboard? Ah, you’ve discovered the one strange thing. In 1963, CRTs were not very common. While punched cards were king, IBM also had a number of Selectric terminals. These were essentially computer-controlled typewriters that had type balls instead of bars that were easy to replace.

Continue reading “A Modern Take On An Old Language” →

The First Fitbit: Engineering And Industrial Design Lessons

August 9, 2024 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

It could happen to anyone of us: suddenly you got this inkling of an idea for a product that you think might just be pretty useful or even cool. Some of us then go on to develop a prototype and manage to get enough seed funding to begin the long and arduous journey to turn a sloppy prototype into a sleek, mass-produced product. This is basically the story of how the Fitbit came to be, with a pretty in-depth article by [Tekla S. Perry] in IEEE Spectrum covering the development process and the countless lessons learned along the way.

Of note was that this idea for an accelerometer-based activity tracker was not new in 2006, as a range of products already existed, from 1960s mechanical pedometers to 1990s medical sensors and the shoe-based Nike+ step tracker that used Apple’s iPod with a receiver. Where this idea for the Fitbit was new was that it’d target a wide audience with a small, convenient (and affordable) device. That also set them up for a major nightmare as the two inventors were plunged into the wonderfully terrifying world of industrial design and hardware development.

One thing that helped a lot was outsourcing what they could to skilled people and having solid seed funding. This left just many hardware decisions to make it as small as possible, as well as waterproof and low-power. The use of the ANT protocol instead of Bluetooth saved a lot of battery, but meant a base station was needed to connect to a PC. Making things waterproof required ultrasonic welding, but lack of antenna testing meant that a closed case had a massively reduced signal strength until a foam shim added some space. The external reset pin on the Fitbit for the base station had a low voltage on it all the time, which led to corrosion issues, and so on.

While much of this was standard development and testing fun, the real challenge was in interpreting the data from the accelerometer. After all, what does a footstep look like to an accelerometer, and when is it just a pothole while travelling by car? Developing a good algorithm here took gathering a lot of real-world data using prototype hardware, which needed tweaking when later Fitbits moved from being clipped-on to being worn on the wrist. These days Fitbit is hardly the only game in town for fitness trackers, but you can definitely blame them for laying much of the groundwork for the countless options today.

The First Real Sputnik

August 7, 2024 by Al Williams 17 Comments

Americans certainly remember Sputnik. At a time when the world was larger and scarier, the Soviets had a metal basketball flying over the United States and the rest of the world. It made people nervous, but it was also a tremendous scientific achievement. However, it wasn’t the plan to use it as the first orbiter, as [Scott Manley] explains in a recent video that you can see below.

The original design would become Sputnik 3, which, as [Scott] puts it, was the first Soviet satellite that “didn’t suck.” The first one was essentially a stunt, and the second one had an animal payload and thermal problems that killed the canine occupant, [Laika].

Continue reading “The First Real Sputnik” →

Polaroid In An Instant

July 31, 2024 by Al Williams 23 Comments

Edwin Land, were he alive, would hate this post. He wanted to be known for this scientific work and not for his personal life. In fact, upon his death, he ordered the destruction of all his personal papers. However, Land was, by our definition, a hacker, and while you probably correctly associate him with the Polaroid camera, that turns out to be only part of the story.

It was obvious that Land was intelligent and inquisitive from an early age. At six, he blew all the fuses in the house. He was known for taking apart clocks and appliances. When his father forbade him from tearing apart a phonograph, he reportedly replied that nothing would deter him from conducting an experiment. We imagine many Hackaday readers have similar childhood stories.

Optics

He was interested in optics, and at around age 13, he became interested in using polarized light to reduce headlight glare. The problem was that one of the best polarizing crystals known — herapathite — was difficult to create in a large size. Herapathite is a crystalline form of iodoquinine sulfate studied in the 1800s by William Herapath, who was unable to grow large sizes of the crystal. Interestingly, one of Herapath’s students noticed the crystals formed when adding iodine to urine from dogs that were given quinine.

Land spent a year at Harvard studying physics, but he left and moved to New York. He continued trying to develop a way to make large, practical, light-polarizing crystals. At night, he would sneak into labs at Columbia University to conduct experiments.

Continue reading “Polaroid In An Instant” →

A Soviet Cassette Recorder Receiving Some Love

July 29, 2024 by Jenny List 40 Comments

For those of us who lived in the capitalist west during the Cold War, there remains a fascination to this day about the Other Side. The propaganda we were fed as kids matched theirs in describing the awful things on the other side of the wall, something that wasn’t borne out when a decade or so later in the 1990s we met people from the former communist side and found them unsurprisingly to be just like us. It’s thus still of interest to have a little peek into Eastern Bloc consumer electronics, something we have the chance of courtesy of [DiodeGoneWild], who’s fixing a 1980s Soviet cassette recorder.

The model in question is a Vesna 309, and it has some audio issues and doesn’t turn the tape. It gets a teardown, the motor is cleaned up inside, and a few capacitor and pot cleanups later it’s working again. But the interest lies as much in the machine itself as it does in the repair, as it’s instructive to compare with a Western machine of the same period.

We’re told it would have been an extremely expensive purchase for a Soviet citizen, and in some ways such as the adjustable level control it’s better-specified than many of our equivalents. It’s based upon up-to-date components for its era, but the surprise comes in how comparatively well engineered it is. A Western cassette deck mechanism would have been a much more sketchy affair than the substantial Soviet one, and its motor would have been a DC part with a simple analogue speed controller rather than the brushless 3-phase unit in the Vesna. Either we’re looking at the cassette deck for senior comrades only, or the propaganda was wrong — at least about their cassette decks. The full video is below, and if you’re hungry for more it’s not the first time we’ve peered into electronics from the eastern side of the Iron Curtain.

Continue reading “A Soviet Cassette Recorder Receiving Some Love” →