RedBox In The 80s: Meet The VHS Vending Behemoth

February 1, 2025 by Lewin Day 18 Comments

Redbox was a company with a moderately interesting business model—it let you rent DVDs from automated kiosks. It’s an idea so simple it’s almost surprising it didn’t appear sooner. Only, it did—all the way back in the VHS age!

Meet the Video Vendor. YouTuber [SpaceTime Junction] was able to track down one of these rare machines, which apparently formerly served an Ohio rental outlet called Kohnen’s. It’s a monstrous thing that stands taller and about three times wider than traditional vending machines, and it could hold up to 320 tapes in its robotic magazine. It’s got lashings of woodgrain, a green-on-black CRT, and the beautiful kind of clicky keys that went away after the 1980s.

[SpaceTime Junction] has a bunch of videos up on the machine, and you even get to see it powered up. It’s a little difficult to see what’s going on, because the machine is something like nine feet wide and it’s all shot in vertical video. There isn’t a whole lot of content on these obscurities out there, so this is a great place to start. Apparently, there were recently a hundred or more of these found living in a Texas warehouse according to Reddit, so we might see more of these popping up online soon. [SpaceTime Junction] has toured that facility, too.

You can read more about the fall of Redbox, or the cleanup afterwards, in our prior coverage.

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A History Of Copper Pours

January 31, 2025 by Al Williams 39 Comments

If you compare a modern PCB with a typical 1980s PCB, you might notice — like [lcamtuf] did — that newer boards tend to have large areas of copper known as pours instead of empty space between traces. If you’ve ever wondered why this is, [lcamtuf] explains.

The answer isn’t as simple as you might think. In some cases, it is just because the designer is either copying the style of a different board or the design software makes it easy to do. However, the reason it caught on in the first place is a combination of high-speed circuitry and FCC RF emissions standards. But why do pours help with unintentional emissions and high-speed signals?

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A design sketch of a partially disassembled candybar mobile phone. The enclosure is a clamshell of plastic that envelops the functional internals of the device and is illustrated to the right upper corner of the image, slightly overlapping the internals evoking the idea of the internals being inserted into the cover. The words "buttons part of the cover" are written toward the top with an arrow toward the numpad and "plastic shell with various design" is written toward the bottom with an arrow toward the translucent blue shell.

The Nokia Design Archive Is Open For Viewing

January 21, 2025 by Navarre Bartz 19 Comments

During the Cambrian Explosion of cellphone form factors at the turn of the millenium, Nokia reigned supreme. If you’d like to see what they were doing behind the scenes to design these wild phones, you’ll love the Nokia Design Archive from Aalto University.

Featuring images, presentations, videos and a number of other goodies (remember transparencies?), this collection gives us some in-depth insight into how consumer products were dreamed up, designed, and brought to market. Some projects require more reading between the lines than others as the Archive is somewhat fragmented, but we think it could still be an invaluable peek into product design, especially if you’re working on projects that you want to be usable outside of a hacker audience.

The Archive also includes approximately 2000 objects including many unreleased “unknown” models and prototypes of phones that actually did make it into the wild. While we’d love to get our hands on some of these devices IRL, having images with reference colors is probably the next best thing. Having replaced a number of smartphone screens, we hope more hackers take up the buttons and indestructible casing of these elegant devices for a more civilized age.

Thanks to [Michael Fitzmayer] for the tip! Be sure to checkout his work on Nokia N-Gage phones, including an SDK if you too love to taco talk.

Forgotten Internet: UUCP

January 16, 2025 by Al Williams 82 Comments

What’s Forgotten Internet? It is the story of parts of the Internet — or Internet precursors — that you might have forgotten about or maybe you missed out on them. This time, we’re looking at Unix-to-Unix Copy, more commonly called UUCP. Developed in the late 1970s, UUCP was a solution for sending messages between systems that were not always connected together. It could also allow remote users to execute commands. By 1979, it was part of the 7th Edition of Unix.

Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie may have used UUCP on a PDP-11 like this one. (Photo via Computer History Museum/Gwen Bell)

Operation was simple. Each computer in a UUCP network had a list of neighbor systems. Don’t forget, they weren’t connected, so instead of an IP address, each system had the other’s phone number to connect to a dial up modem. You also needed a login name and password. Almost certainly, by the way, those modems operated at 300 baud or less.

If a computer could dial out, when someone wanted to send something or do a remote execution, the UUCP system would call a neighboring computer. However, some systems couldn’t dial out, so it was also possible for a neighbor to call in and poll to see if there was anything you needed to do. Files would go from one system to another using a variety of protocols.

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Carnarvon’s Decommissioned NASA Satellite Dish Back In Service After 40 Years

January 12, 2025 by Maya Posch 35 Comments

The OTC Station 29.8 meter dish at Carnarvon, Australia, in need of a bit of paint. (Credit: ABC News Australia)

Recently the 29.8 meter parabolic antenna at the Australian OTC (overseas telecommunications commission) station came back to life again after nearly forty years spent in decommissioning limbo.

This parabolic dish antenna shares an illustrious history together with the older 12.8 meter Casshorn antenna in that together they assisted with many NASA missions over the decades. These not only include the Apollo 11 Moon landing with the small antenna, but joined by the larger parabolic dish (in 1969) the station performed tracking duty for NASA, ESA and many other missions. Yet in 1987 the station was decommissioned, with scrapping mostly averted due to the site being designated a heritage site, with a local museum.

Then in 2022 the 29.8 meter parabolic dish antenna was purchased by by ThothX Australia, who together with the rest of ThothX’s world-wide presence will be integrating this latest addition into a satellite tracking system that seems to have the interest of various (military, sigh) clients.

Putting this decommissioned dish back into service wasn’t simply a matter of flipping a few switches. Having sat mostly neglected for decades it requires extensive refurbishing, but this most recent milestone demonstrates that the dish is capable of locking onto a satellites. This opens the way for a top-to-bottom refurbishment, the installation of new equipment and also a lick of paint on the dish itself, a process that will still take many years but beats watching such a historic landmark rust away by many lightyears.

Featured image: OTC Earth Station. (Credit: Paul Dench)

The Engineer Behind Mine Detection

January 10, 2025 by Al Williams 8 Comments

According to [Joanna Goodrich] in IEEE Spectrum, prior to World War II, soldiers who wanted to find land mines, simply poked at the ground with pointed sticks or bayonets. As you might expect, this wasn’t very safe or reliable. In 1941, a Polish signals officer, [Józef Stanislaw Kosacki], escaped to Britain and created an effective portable mine detector.

[Kosaci] was an electrical engineer trained at the Warsaw University of Technology. He had worked as a manager for the Polish National Telecommunication Institute. In 1937, the government tasked him with developing a machine that could detect unexploded grenades and shells. The machine was never deployed.

When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, [Kosacki] returned to military service (he had done a year of compulsory service earlier). He was captured and kept in a prison camp in Hungary. But he managed to escape in late 1939 and joined the Polish Army Corps in Britain, teaching Morse code to soldiers.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Security Envelopes

January 8, 2025 by Kristina Panos 18 Comments

You probably get a few of these things each week in the mail. And some of them actually do a good job of obscuring the contents inside, even if you hold the envelope up to the light. But have you ever taken the time to appreciate the beauty of security envelope patterns? Yeah, I didn’t think so.

The really interesting thing is just how many different patterns are out there when a dozen or so would probably cover it. But there are so, so many patterns in the world. In my experience, many utilities and higher-end companies create their own security patterns for mailing out statements and the like, so that right there adds up to some unknown abundance.

So, what did people do before security envelopes? When exactly did they come along? And how many patterns are out there? Let’s take a look beneath the flap.

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