Breaking Enigma With An FPGA, Just Like At Bletchley Park

May 30, 2026 by Tyler August 14 Comments

The pioneering work done by Alan Turing and others at Bletchley Park in England was perhaps as important in the history of technology as it was the history of the war. Given the last 80-odd years of technological development, their revolutionary work should be within the realms of a student project — which it was, specifically in ECE 5760 at Cornell University. The work was done by [Erica Jiang], [Kelvin Resch], and [Isabella Frank].

Nowadays if someone told you there was a code to be broken, you wouldn’t be reaching for electromechanical devices, but you just might think of trying an FPGA. After all, the programmable gate arrays allow for much faster execution of fixed logic than software running on a traditional CPU. That won’t help much with modern RSA schemes, and for Enigma, it’s massively overkill, but doing it that way was a great learning opportunity for the students.

Their project emulates the whole Bletchley Park cryptography apparatus, not just the Bombe Machine, and if you’re interested in learning about this piece of history you could absolutely do worse than to examine their documentation. If you’re into video, you can check out the final presentation and demo video below. Meanwhile if you’re wondering what the opposition was up to, we have good explainer of the enigma machine here.

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Virtual Museum Hosts Every OS You Haven’t Heard Of

May 28, 2026 by Tyler August 12 Comments

OK, every operating system is a bit of a stretch — Windows Vista notably didn’t make the cut — but [Andrew]’s Virtual OS museum has a good claim to being the most comprehensive archive of operating systems yet assembled.

[Andrew] has a blog post describing the project, as well as a YouTube video that we’ve embedded below. But the real fun is in the downloading and spinning up one of 570+ operating systems for more than 250 platforms on pre-configured virtual machines that have been packaged up for us.

This isn’t just the usual retrocomputer nostalgia-fest of Macintosh System and DOSBox. There’s everything from IBM Big Iron and VAXen to Texas Instrument graphing calculators emulated in the museum, with software to run on them, too. If you’ve ever wondered what you could do with the Manchester Baby, well, all known software for that machine is included with its ‘operating system’.

Admission is free, but like any good museum you’ll be waiting in line a while to get in, so expect the full 128 GB download to take some time. If you’re into computer history, though, it’s going to very much be worth the wait. If you try it and like it, you could help others by seeding the torrent.

The actual museum launches in a VM as a modern Linux system — perhaps that can be considered an exhibit itself — with a launcher to select any of the other system/OS combos, including various other, older Linuxes hosted on their own VMs. There are more to come, too, as [Andrew] continues the long debugging process of making sure everything works as expected.

Purists may decry this virtual emulation as not being quite the real thing, which is true. But while MiSTer supports a lot of cores via FPGA, you probably won’t find everything here on that platform. We have, however, seen an FPGA recreation of the Manchester Baby. More than once, even.

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A prototype VLIW computer made by Multiflow

A History On The “Impossible” VLIW Computing

April 7, 2026 by Julian Scheffers 14 Comments

A computer does one thing at a time, even if it feels like it’s doing multiple things at once. In reality, it’s just switching between tasks very quickly. But a VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) computer is different. Today, [Asianometry] tells us about VLIW computing and its history.

Processors have multiple functional units; for example, you might have separate units each for addition, multiplication and division. But because it runs one instruction at a time, these units tend to spend a large amount of time idle. VLIW aims to address this inefficiency by reinventing what an instruction means. Instead of telling the whole processor what to do, a VLIW instruction tells each functional unit what to do at once. Sounds good, right? Well, that was the easy part.

The hard part? How to compile a program for a VLIW computer, that can actually make use of all the functional units at once; after all, the efficiency promise is that the higher activity makes up for larger instruction words to fetch. That is the compiler’s job; VLIW compilers try to reschedule the operations in the program to convert sequential code into more parallel operations then compiled into the titular very long instruction words.

[Asianometry] goes into detail about this, the history, and more in the video after the break.
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Crazy Old Machines

January 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 44 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 66 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.

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