Australia is known for great beaches, top-tier coffee, and a laidback approach to life that really doesn’t square with all the rules and regulations that exist Down Under. What it isn’t known for is being a spacefaring nation.
As it stands, a startup called Gilmour Space has been making great efforts to give Australia the orbital launch capability it’s never had. After numerous hurdles and delays, the company finally got their rocket off the launch pad. Unfortunately, it just didn’t get much farther than that.
Lightning is a powerful force, one seemingly capable of great destruction in the right circumstances. It announces itself with a searing flash, followed by a deep rumble heard for miles around.
Intuitively, it might seem like a lightning strike would be disastrous for something like a plane flying at altitude. And yet, while damage is possible, more often than not—a plane will get through a lightning storm unscathed. Let’s explore the physics at play.
The MOS Technology 6502 is a microprocessor which casts a long shadow over the world of computing. Many of you will know it as the beating heart of so many famous 8-bit machines from the likes of Commodore, Apple, Acorn, and more, and it has retained enough success for a version to remain in production today. It’s still a surprise though, to note that this part is now fifty years old. Though there are several contenders for its birthday, the first adverts for it were in print by July 1975, and the first customers bought their chips in September of that year. It’s thus only fitting that in August 2025, we give this processor a retrospective.
The Moment Motorola Never Really Recovered From
The advert that started it all. MOS Technology, Public domain.
The story of the 6502’s conception is a fascinating tale of how the giants of the early mocroprocessor industry set about grappling with these new machines. In the earlier half of the 1970s, Chuck Peddle worked for Motorola, whose 6800 microprocessor reached the market in 1974. The 6800 was for its time complex, expensive, and difficult to manufacture, and Peddle’s response to this was a far simpler device with a slimmed-down instruction set that his contact with customers had convinced him the market was looking for: the 6502.
There’s a tale of Motorola officially ordering him to stop working on this idea, something he would later assert as such an abandonment of the technology that he could claim the IP for himself. Accompanied by a group of his Motorola 6800 colleagues, in the summer of 1974 he jumped ship for MOS Technology to pursue the design. What first emerged was the 6501, a chip pin-compatible with the 6800, followed soon after by the 6502, with the same core, but with an on-board clock oscillator. Continue reading “Happy Birthday 6502”→
In the formative experiences of most Hackaday readers there will almost certainly be a number of common threads, for example the ownership of a particular game console, or being inspired into engineering curiosity by the same TV shows. A home computer of a TV show may mark you as coming from a particular generation, but there are some touchstones which cross the decades.
Those of us who like to monitor air traffic with ADS-B aggregators such as FlightAware and ADS-B Exchange tend to see some interesting flight paths. I’m not talking about the truly ambitious pictures drawn by pilots, or even the more ribald ones, but rather flights that follow paths that seem to make little sense from either a commercial or leisure standpoint.
Most of these mystery flights have long straight stretches interrupted by occasional tight loops, and often cover great distances across rural and urban landscapes alike. A glance at the ADS-B data indicates that these flights are usually pretty close to the ground, and are often completed by helicopters. Occasionally, the registration of the aircraft will even indicate ownership by some “three-letter” federal agency.
Although mystery helicopters flying odd patterns in the sky seems like a good excuse to don a tinfoil hat and head to one’s bunker, chances are pretty good that these aircraft are engaged in a far less nefarious and far more useful endeavour: aerial transmission line patrols. These flights are key to keeping the transmission lines that form the backbone of the grid in tip-top shape, especially at a time of unprecedented growth in load and a shift in the generation profile away from fossil fuels towards renewables.
Today, creating a ground-breaking video game is akin to making a movie. You need a story, graphic artists, music, and more. But until the middle of the 20th century, there were no video games. While several games can claim to be the “first” electronic or video game, one is cemented in our collective memory as the first one we’d heard of: Pong.
The truth is, Pong wasn’t the first video game. We suspect that many people might have had the idea, but Ralph Baer is most associated with inventing a practical video game. As a young engineer in 1951, he tried to convince his company to invest in games that you could play on your TV set. They didn’t like the idea, but Ralph would remember the concept and act on it over a decade later.
But was it really the first time anyone had thought of it? Perhaps not. Thomas Goldsmith Jr. and Estle Ray Mann filed a patent in 1947 for a game that simulated launching missiles at targets with an oscilloscope display. The box took eight tubes and, being an oscilloscope, was a vector graphic device. The targets were physical dots on a screen overlay. These “amusement devices” were very expensive, and they only produced handmade prototypes.
After World War II, as early supersonic military aircraft were pushing the boundaries of flight, it seemed like a foregone conclusion that commercial aircraft would eventually fly faster than sound as the technology became better understood and more affordable. Indeed, by the 1960s the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union all had plans to develop commercial transport aircraft capable flight beyond Mach 1 in various stages of development.
Concorde on its final flight
Yet today, the few examples of supersonic transport (SST) planes that actually ended up being built are in museums, and flight above Mach 1 is essentially the sole domain of the military. There’s an argument to be made that it’s one of the few areas of technological advancement where the state-of-the-art not only stopped moving forward, but actually slid backwards.
But that might finally be changing, at least in the United States. Both NASA and the private sector have been working towards a new generation of supersonic aircraft that address the key issues that plagued their predecessors, and a recent push by the White House aims to undo the regulatory roadblocks that have been on the books for more than fifty years.
