The Rise And Fall Of Free Dial Up Internet

March 18, 2026 by Al Williams 48 Comments

In the early days of the Internet, having a high-speed IP connection in your home or even a small business was, if not impossible, certainly a rarity. Connecting to a computer in those days required you to use your phone. Early modems used acoustic couplers, but by the time most people started trying to connect, modems that plugged into your phone jack were the norm.

The problem was: whose computer did you call? There were commercial dial-up services like DIALOG that offered very expensive services, such as database searches via modem. That could be expensive. You had a fee for the phone. Then you might have a per-minute charge for the phone call, especially if the computer was in another city. Then you had to pay the service provider, which could be very expensive.

Even before the consumer Internet, this wasn’t workable. Tymnet and Telenet were two services that had the answer. They maintained banks of modems practically everywhere. You dialed a local number, which was probably a “free” call included in your monthly bill, and then used a simple command to connect to a remote computer of your choice. There were other competitors, including CompuServe, which would become a major force in the fledgling consumer market.

While some local internet service providers (ISPs) had their own modem banks, when you saw the rise of national ISPs, they were riding on one of several nationwide modem systems and paying by the minute for the privilege. Eventually, some ISPs reached the scale that made dedicated modem banks worthwhile. This made it easier to offer flat-rate pricing, and the presumed likelihood of everyone dialing in at once made it possible to oversubscribe any given number of modems.

The Cost

Once consumer services like CompuServe, The Source, and AOL started operations, the cost was less, but still not inexpensive. Some early services charged higher rates during business hours, for example. There was also the cost of a phone line, and if you didn’t want to tie up your home phone, you needed a second line dedicated to the modem. It all added up.

By the late 1990s, a dial-up provider might cost you $25 a month or less, not counting your phone line. That’s about $60 in today’s money, just for reference. But the Internet was also booming as a place to sell advertising.

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Hacking The System In A Moral Panic: We Need To Talk

March 17, 2026 by Jenny List 95 Comments

It seems that for as long as there have been readily available 3D printers, there have been moral panics about their being used to print firearms. The latest surrounds a Washington State Legislature bill, HB2320, which criminalises the printing of unregistered guns. Perhaps most controversially, it seeks so impose a requirement on printers sold in the state to phone home and check a database of known firearms and refuse to print them when asked.

This has drawn a wave of protest from the 3D printing community, and seems from where we are sitting to be a spectacularly ill-conceived piece of legislation. It’s simply not clear how it could be implemented, given the way 3D printers and slicing software actually work.

Oddly This Isn’t About Firearms

The root of the problem with this bill and others like it lies in ignorance, and a misplaced belief in the power of legislation. Firearms are just the example here, but we can think of others and we’re sure you can too. Legislators aren’t stupid, but by and large they don’t come from technology or engineering backgrounds.

Meanwhile they have voters to keep happy, and therefore when a moral panic like this one arises their priority is to be seen to be doing something about it. They dream up a technically infeasible solution, push to get it written into law, and their job is done. Let the engineers figure out how to make it work. Continue reading “Hacking The System In A Moral Panic: We Need To Talk” →

Fictional Moon: Reality TV And SciFi Don’t Mix

March 17, 2026 by Al Williams 33 Comments

It is a safe bet that nearly all Hackaday readers like to at least imagine what it would be like to build and live in an orbital station, on the moon, or on another planet. Moon bases and colonies show up all the time in fictional writing and movies, too. For the Hackaday crowd, some of these are plausible, and others are — well — a bit fanciful. However, there’s one fictional moonbase that we think might have been too realistic: Moonbase 3.

If that didn’t ring a bell, we aren’t surprised. The six-episode series was a co-production between Twentieth Century Fox and the BBC that aired in 1973. To make matters worse, after the initial airings in the UK, Australia, and New Zealand, the video master tapes were wiped out. Until 1993, there were no known copies of the show, but then one turned up in a US television station.

The show had many links to Dr. Who and, in fact, if you think the spacesuits look familiar, they made later appearances in two Dr. Who episodes.

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How I 3D Printed My Own Lego-Compatible Train Bridges

March 16, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 38 Comments

Lego train sets have been available for decades, now. The Danish manufacturer long ago realized the magic of combining its building block sets with motors and plastic rails to create real working railways for children and adults to enjoy. Over the years, Lego has innovated through several generations of trains, from classic metal-rail systems to the more modern IR and later Bluetooth-controlled versions. The only thing largely missing over all that time, though…? A bridge!

Yes, Lego has largely neglected to build any bridges for its mainstream train lineup. There are aftermarket solutions, and innovative hacks invented by the community, all with their own limitations and drawbacks. This glaring oversight, though, seemed like a perfect opportunity to me. It was time to fire up the 3D printer and churn out a fully-realized Lego rail bridge of my very own.

Bridges Are Hard

I’ve experimented with building Lego rail bridges before, using standard track and household objects like cardboard, books, and beer. Unfortunately, it can be very difficult to support the track evenly at the joints which occur every 150mm, and derailments are common. Credit: author

There’s actually a good reason Lego bridges aren’t a big thing in the company’s own product lineup, beyond a few obscure historical parts. This is probably because they aren’t very practical. Lego locomotives are not particularly strong haulers, nor do they have excellent grip on the rails, and this makes them very poor at climbing even mild grades. Any official Lego bridge would have to be very long with a shallow slope just to allow a train to climb high enough to clear a locomotive on a track below. This would end up being an expensive set that would probably prove unpopular with the casual Lego train builder, even if the diehard enthusiasts loved it.

There are third-party options available out there. However, most rely on standard Lego track pieces and merely combine them with supports that hold them up at height. This can work in some cases, but it can be very difficult to do cool things like passing a Lego train under a bridge, for example. It can be hard to gain enough height, and the short length of Lego track pieces makes it hard to squeeze a locomotive between supports. Continue reading “How I 3D Printed My Own Lego-Compatible Train Bridges” →

Ask Hackaday: Wired Or Wireless Headphones?

March 16, 2026 by Al Williams 71 Comments

They say you should never throw out old clothes because they will come back in style one day. Maybe they are right. We noted in a recent BBC post that, apparently, wired headphones are making a comeback. Like many people, we were dismayed when Apple took the headphone jack out of the iPhone and, as [Thomas Germain] notes, even Google eventually ejected the normal headphone jack. (Although, in fairness, most of the Pixel phones we’ve seen come with a pair of USB-C earbuds.)

On the face of it, though, wireless seems to be a good idea. You can get cheap Bluetooth earbuds now, although maybe still not as cheap as wired buds. Sure, they sound terrible, but so do cheap buds. It is a pain to charge them, of course, but not having to untangle wires is a benefit. On the other hand, you never have to charge your wired headphones.

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Hackaday Links: March 15, 2026

March 15, 2026 by Tom Nardi 4 Comments

Some days, it feels like we’re getting all the bad parts of cyberpunk and none of the cool stuff. Megacorps and cyber warfare? Check. Flying cars and holograms? Not quite yet. This week, things took a further turn for the dystopian with the news that a woman was hospitalized after an altercation with a humanoid robot in Macau. Police arrived on scene, took the bot into custody, and later told the media they believed this was the first time Chinese authorities had been called to intervene between a robot and a human.

The woman, reportedly in her seventies, was apparently shocked when she realized the robot was standing behind her. After the dust settled, the police determined it was being operated remotely as part of a promotion for a local business. We’ve heard there’s no such thing as bad publicity, but we’re not sure the maxim holds true when you manage to put an old lady into the hospital with your ad campaign.

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What Is A Computer?

March 14, 2026 by Elliot Williams 36 Comments

On the podcast, [Tom] and I were talking about the new generation of smartphones which are, at least in terms of RAM and CPU speed, on par with a decent laptop computer. If so, why not just add on a screen, keyboard, and mouse and use it as your daily driver? That was the question posed by [ETA Prime] in a video essay and attempt to do so.

Our consensus was that it’s the Android operating system holding it back. Some of the applications you might want to run just aren’t there, and on the open side of the world, even more are missing. Is the platform usable if you can’t get the software you need to get your work done?

But that’s just the computer-as-a-tool side of the equation. The other thing a computer is, at least to many of our kind of folk, is a playground. It’s a machine for experimenting with, and for having fun just messing around. Android has become way too polished to have fun, and recent changes on the Google side of things actively prevent you from installing arbitrary software. The hardware is similarly too slimmed-down to allow for experimentation.

Looking back, these have been the same stumbling blocks for the last decade. In 2018, I was wondering aloud why we as a community don’t hack on cell phones, and the answer then was the same as it is now – the software is not friendly to our kind. You can write phone apps, and I have tried to do so, but it’s just not fun.

The polar opposites of the smartphone-as-computer are no strangers in our community. I’m thinking of the Linux single-board computers, or even something like a Steam Deck, all of which are significantly less powerful spec-wise than a flagship cell phone, but which are in many ways much more suitable for hacking. Why? Because they make it easy to do the things that we like to do. They’re designed to be fun computers, and so we use them.

So for me, a smartphone isn’t a computer, but oddly enough it’s not because of the hardware. It’s because what I want out of a computer is more than Turing completeness. What I want is the fun and the freedom of computering.