For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’s running on outdated hardware. So when we learned that part of the San Francisco transit system still runs on 5-1/4″ floppies, we sat up and took notice. The article is a bit stingy with the technical details, but the gist is that the Automatic Train Control System was installed in the Market Street subway station in 1998 and uses three floppy drives to load DOS and the associated custom software. If memory serves, MS-DOS as a standalone OS was pretty much done by about 1995 — Windows 95, right? — so the system was either obsolete before it was even installed, or the 1998 instance was an upgrade of an earlier system. Either way, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) says that the 1998 system due to be replaced originally had a 25-year lifespan, so they’re more or less on schedule. Replacement won’t be cheap, though; Hitachi Rail, the same outfit that builds systems that control things like the bullet train in Japan, is doing the job for the low, low price of $212 million.
hackaday links265 Articles
Hackaday Links: November 24, 2024
We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, that’s understandable, because the man behind the first computer BBS wasn’t much for the spotlight. Along with Randy Suess and in response to the Blizzard of ’78, which kept their Chicago computer club from meeting in person, Christensen created an electronic version of a community corkboard. Suess worked on the hardware while Christensen provided the software, leveraging his XMODEM file-sharing protocol. They dubbed their creation a “bulletin board system” and when the idea caught on, they happily shared their work so that other enthusiasts could build their own systems.
Hackaday Links: November 17, 2024
A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate. The video showing this process generated a lot of interest and no fewer than 20 tips to the Hackaday tips line, which continued to come in dribs and drabs this week. In a world where low-cost, fast-turn PCB fabs exist, the amount of effort that went into this method makes little sense, and readers certainly made that known in the comments section. Given that the blokes who pulled this off are gearheads with no hobby electronics background, it kind of made their approach a little more understandable, but it still left a ton of practical questions about how they pulled it off. And now a new video from the aptly named Bad Obsession Motorsports attempts to explain what went on behind the scenes.
Hackaday Links: November 10, 2024
Fair warning, while the first item this week has no obvious connection to hacking, when 43 Rhesus monkeys escape from a lab, it’s just something that needs to be discussed. The tiny primates broke free from Alpha Genesis, a primate research facility in South Carolina. The monkey jailbreak seems to have occurred sometime on Wednesday, shortly after which the sheriff of Beaufort County was notified to be on the lookout for the tribe. Luckily, none of the animals has been used in any kind of infectious disease research, so this likely won’t be the origin story for anything apocalyptic. At least some of the animals were quickly located, doing their monkey thing in the woods and getting to swing from real trees for probably the first time in their lives. Alpha Genesis employees are trying to lure the monkeys back to captivity with food, but we suspect they’re too smart for that. They’ll probably come back on their own recognizance or when they get bored and realize that the real world isn’t all they thought it would be. When it’s all done we’d love to hear details about the breakout; was it something the monkeys got together and planned, or did one of the humans mess up?
Hackaday Links: November 3, 2024
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times?” Perhaps not anymore, if this Ig Nobel-worthy analysis of the infinite monkey theorem is to be believed. For the uninitiated, the idea is that if you had an infinite number of monkeys randomly typing on an infinite number of keyboards, eventually the complete works of Shakespeare or some other famous writer would appear. It’s always been meant to be taken figuratively as a demonstration of the power of time and randomness, but some people just can’t leave well enough alone. The research, which we hope was undertaken with tongue firmly planted in cheek, reveals that it would take longer than the amount of time left before the heat death of the universe for either a single monkey or even all 200,000 chimpanzees in the world today to type the 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s complete works in the proper order.
Hackaday Links: October 27, 2024
Problem solved? If the problem is supplying enough lithium to build batteries for all the electric vehicles that will be needed by 2030, then a new lithium deposit in Arkansas might be a resounding “Yes!” The discovery involves the Smackover Formation — and we’ll be honest here that half the reason we chose to feature this story was to be able to write “Smackover Formation” — which is a limestone aquifer covering a vast arc from the Rio Grande River in Texas through to the western tip of the Florida panhandle. Parts of the aquifer, including the bit that bulges up into southern Arkansas, bear a brine rich in lithium salts, far more so than any of the brines currently commercially exploited for lithium metal production elsewhere in the world. Given the measured concentration and estimated volume of brine in the formation, there could be between 5 million and 19 million tons of lithium in the formation; even at the lower end of the range, that’s enough to build nine times the number of EV batteries needed.
Hackaday Links: October 20, 2024
When all else fails, there’s radio. Hurricane Helene’s path of destruction through Appalachia stripped away every shred of modern infrastructure in some areas, leaving millions of residents with no ability to reach out to family members or call for assistance, and depriving them of any news from the outside world. But radio seems to be carrying the day, with amateur radio operators and commercial broadcasters alike stepping up to the challenge.