Crazy Old Machines

January 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 43 Comments

Al and I were talking about the IBM 9020 FAA Air Traffic Control computer system on the podcast. It’s a strange machine, made up of a bunch of IBM System 360 mainframes connected together to a common memory unit, with all sorts of custom peripherals to support keeping track of airplanes in the sky. Absolutely go read the in-depth article on that machine if it sparks your curiosity.

It got me thinking about how strange computers were in the early days, and how boringly similar they’ve all become. Just looking at the word sizes of old machines is a great example. Over the last, say, 40 years, things that do computing have had 4, 8, 16, 32, or even 64-bit words. You noticed the powers-of-two trend going on here, right? Basically starting with the lowly Intel 4004, it’s been round numbers ever since.

On the other side of the timeline, though, you get strange beasts. The classic PDP-8 had 12-bit words, while its predecessors the PDP-6 and PDP-1 had 36 bits and 18 bits respectively. (Factors of six?) There’s a string of military guidance computers that had 27-bit words, while the Apollo Guidance computer ran 15-bit words. UNIVAC III had 25-bit words, putting the 23-bit Harvard Mark I to shame.

I wasn’t there, but it gives you the feeling that each computer is a unique, almost hand-crafted machine. Some must have made their odd architectural choices to suit particular functions, others because some designer had a clever idea. I’m not a computer historian, but I’m sure that the word lengths must tell a number of interesting stories.

On the whole, though, it gives the impression of a time when each computer was it’s own unique machine, before the convergence of everything to roughly the same architectural ideas. A much more hackery time, for lack of a better word. We still see echoes of this in the people who make their own “retro” computers these days, either virtually, on a breadboard, or emulated in the fabric of an FPGA. It’s not just nostalgia, though, but a return to a time when there was more creative freedom: a time before 64 bits took over.

A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet

December 15, 2025 by Al Williams 63 Comments

We noted that Excel turned 40 this year. That makes it seem old, and today, if you say “spreadsheet,” there’s a good chance you are talking about an Excel spreadsheet, and if not, at least a program that can read and produce Excel-compatible sheets. But we remember a time when there was no Excel. But there were still spreadsheets. How far back do they go? Continue reading “A Brief History Of The Spreadsheet” →

Hackaday Links: November 9, 2025

November 9, 2025 by Dan Maloney 25 Comments

We’re always a wee bit suspicious about articles that announce some sort of “World’s first” accomplishment. With a couple of hundred thousand years of history, most of which wasn’t recorded, over which something like 117 billion humans have lived, any claims of primacy have to be taken with a grain of salt. So when the story of the world’s first instance of a car being hit by a meteorite came across our feed, we had to check it out. The car in question, a Tesla, was being driven in South Australia by veterinarian Andrew Melville-Smith when something suddenly crashed into its windshield.

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Remembering Chiptunes, The Demoscene And The Illegal Music Of Keygens

July 20, 2025 by Tyler August 39 Comments

We loved keygens back in the day. Our lawyers advise us to clarify that it’s because of the demo-scene style music embedded in them, not because we used them for piracy. [Patch] must feel the same way, as he has a lovely historical retrospective out on “The Internet’s Most Illegal Music” (embedded below).

After defining what he’s talking about for the younger set, who may never have seen a keygen in this degenerate era of software-by-subscription, [Patch] traces the history of the jaunty chiptunes that were so often embedded in this genre of program. He starts with the early demoscene and its relationship with cracker groups — those are coders who circulate “cracked” versions of games, with the copyright protection removed. In the old days, they’d embed an extra loading screen to take credit for the dastardly deeds that our lawyer says to disavow.

Continue reading “Remembering Chiptunes, The Demoscene And The Illegal Music Of Keygens” →

An Emulated Stroll Down Macintosh Memory Lane

July 10, 2025 by Tyler August 6 Comments

If you’re into Macs, you’ll always remember your first. Maybe it was the revolutionary classic of 1984 fame, perhaps it was the adorable G3 iMac in 1998, or even a shiny OS X machine in the 21st century. Whichever it is, you’ll find it emulated in [Marcin Wichary]’s essay “Frame of preference: A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004” — an exploration of the control panel and its history.

Image of PowerBook showing the MacOS 8.0 desktop. — That’s not a photograph, it’s an emulator. (At least on the page. Here, it’s a screenshot.)

[Marcin] is a UI designer as well as an engineer and tech historian, and his UI chops come out in full force, commenting and critiquing Curputino’s coercions. The writing is excellent, as you’d expect from the man who wrote the book on keyboards, and it provides a fascinating look at the world of retrocomputing through the eyes of a designer. That design-focused outlook is very apropos for Apple in particular. (And NeXT, of course, because you can’t tell the story of Apple without it.)

There are ten emulators on the page, provided by [Mihai Parparita] of Infinite Mac. It’s like a virtual museum with a particularly knowledgeable tour guide — and it’s a blast, getting to feel hands-on, the design changes being discussed. There’s a certain amount of gamification, with each system having suggested tasks and a completion score when you finish reading. There are even Easter eggs.

This is everything we wish the modern web was like: the passionate deep-dives of personal sites on the Old Web, but enhanced and enabled by modern technology. If you’re missing those vintage Mac days and don’t want to explore them in browser, you can 3D print your own full-size replica, or a doll-sized picoMac.

Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines

June 3, 2024 by Elliot Williams 2 Comments

This neat video from the [Computer History Archives Project] documents the development of the Aiken Mark I through Mark IV computers. Partly shrouded in the secrecy of World War II and the Manhattan Project effort, the Mark I, “Harvard’s Robot Super Brain”, was built and donated by IBM, and marked their entry into what we would now call the computer industry.

Numerous computing luminaries used the Mark I, aside from its designer Howard Aiken. Grace Hopper, Richard Bloch, and even John von Neumann all used the machine. It was an electromechanical computer, using gears, punch tape, relays, and a five horsepower motor to keep it all running in sync. If you want to dig into how it actually worked, the deliciously named patent “Calculator” goes into some detail.

The video goes on to tell the story of Aiken’s various computers, the rift between Harvard and IBM, and the transition of computation from mechanical to electronic. If this is computer history that you don’t know, it’s well worth a watch. (And let us know if you also think that they’re using computer-generated speech to narrate it.)

If “modern” computer history is more your speed, check out this documentary about ENIAC.

Continue reading “Aiken’s Secret Computing Machines” →

Debugging A 1950s Computer Sounds Like A Pain

October 20, 2023 by Richard Baguley 24 Comments

Debugging computers in the 1950s sounds like it wasn’t an easy task. That’s one of the interesting facts from this fascinating talk by [Guy Fedorkow] about the Whirlwind, one of the first digital computers ever built. The development of this remarkable computer started at MIT (Funded by the US Navy) in 1949 as a flight simulator but pivoted to plotting interceptions in the early 1950s. That was because the USSR had just set off their first boosted nuclear bomb, which could be mounted on a missile or bomber. So, the threat of incoming missiles and atomic bombers became real, and the need arose to intercept nuclear bombers.

As a real-time computer, Whirlwind received radar data from radar stations around the US that showed the location of the interceptor and the incoming bogey, then calculated the vector for the two to meet up and, erm, have a frank exchange of views. So, how do you debug one of the first real-time computers? Carefully, it seems.

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