Crazy Old Machines

January 24, 2026 by Elliot Williams 42 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.

Get Bored!

January 17, 2026 by Elliot Williams 40 Comments

My son went over to a friends house this afternoon, when my wife had been planning on helping him with his French homework. This meant she had an hour or so of unexpected free time. Momentarily at a loss, she asked me what she should do, and my reply was “slack off”, meaning do something fun and creative instead of doing housework or whatever. Take a break! She jokingly replied that slacking off wasn’t on her to-do list, so she wouldn’t even know how to start.

But as with every joke, there’s more than a kernel of truth to it. We often get so busy with stuff that we’ve got to do, that we don’t leave enough time to slack, to get bored, or to simply do nothing. And that’s a pity, because do-nothing time is often among the most creative times. It’s when your mind wanders aimlessly that you find inspiration for that upgrade to the z-stage on your laser cutter, or whatever the current back-burner project of the moment is.

You don’t get bored when you’re watching TV, playing video games, or scrolling around the interwebs on your phone, and it’s all too easy to fall into these traps. To get well and truly bored requires discipline these days, so maybe putting “slack” into your to-do list isn’t a bad idea after all. My wife was right! And that’s why I volunteered to take my son to parkour on Sundays – it’s and hour of guaranteed, 100% uninterruptible boredom. How do you make sure you get your weekly dose of slack?

For The Fun Of It

January 10, 2026 by Elliot Williams 12 Comments

I was off at the Chaos Communication Congress last weekend, and one of the big attractions for one who is nerdily inclined is seeing all of the personal projects that everyone brings along with them. Inevitably, someone would ask me what my favorite is. Maybe it’s my decision paralysis, maybe it’s being forced to pick a favorite child on the spot, or maybe it’s just that I’m not walking around ranking them, but that question always left me drawing a blank.

But after a week of thinking about it, I’m pretty sure I know why: I don’t actually care what I think of other peoples’ projects! I’m simply stoked to talk to everyone who brought anything, and bathe in the success and failure, hearing about the challenges that they saw coming, and then the new challenges they met along the way. I want to know what the hacker thinks of their project, what their intention was, and how their story went. I’m just a spectator, so I collected stories.

The overwhelming, entirely non-surprising result of listening to a couple hundred hackers talk about their projects? They’re all doing it for the fun of it. Simply for the grins. And that held equally well for the supremely planned-out and technical projects as well as their simpler I-bought-these-surplus-on-eBay-one-night relatives. “We were sitting around and thought, wouldn’t it be fun…” was the start of nearly every story.

That’s what I absolutely love about our community: that people are hacking because it makes them happy, and that the amazing variety of projects suggests an endless possibility for hacker happiness. It’s hard to come away from an event like that without being energized. Some of that comes from the sharing of ideas and brainstorming and hanging out with like-minded folks, but what I find most important is simply the celebration of the joy of the project for its own sake.

Happy hacking!

Retrocomputing: Simulacrum Or The Real Deal?

December 20, 2025 by Elliot Williams 35 Comments

The holidays are rapidly approaching, and you probably already have a topic or two to argue with your family about. But what about with your hacker friends? We came upon an old favorite the other day: whether it “counts” as retrocomputing if you’re running a simulated version of the system or if it “needs” to run on old iron.

This lovely C64esque laptop sparked the controversy. It’s an absolute looker, with a custom keyboard and a retro-reimagining-period-correct flaptop design, but the beauty is only skin deep: the guts are a Raspberry Pi 5 running VICE. An emulator! Horrors!

We’ll admit to being entirely torn. There’s something about the old computers that’s very nice to lay hands on, and we just don’t get the same feels from an emulator running on our desktop. But a physical reproduction like with many of the modern C64 recreations, or [Oscar Vermeulen]’s PiDP-8/I really floats our boat in a way that an in-the-browser emulation experience simply doesn’t.

Another example was the Voja 4, the Supercon 2022 badge based on a CPU that never existed. It’s not literally retro, because [Voja Antonics] designed it during the COVID quarantines, so there’s no “old iron” at all. Worse, it’s emulated; the whole thing exists as a virtual machine inside the onboard PIC.

But we’d argue that this badge brought more people something very much like the authentic PDP-8 experience, or whatever. We saw people teaching themselves to do something functional in an imaginary 4-bit machine language over a weekend, and we know folks who’ve kept at it in the intervening years. Part of the appeal was that it reflected nearly everything about the machine state in myriad blinking lights. Or rather, it reflected the VM running on the PIC, because remember, it’s all just a trick.

So we’ll fittingly close this newsletter with a holiday message of peace to the two retrocomputing camps: Maybe you’re both right. Maybe the physical device and its human interfaces do matter – emulation sucks – but maybe it’s not entirely relevant what’s on the inside of the box if the outside is convincing enough. After all, if we hadn’t done [Kevin Noki] dirty by showing the insides of his C64 laptop, maybe nobody would ever have known.

User Serviceable Parts

December 13, 2025 by Elliot Williams 18 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast about the Home Assistant home automation hub software. In particular, about how devilishly well designed it is for extensibility. It’s designed to be added on to, and that makes all of the difference.
That doesn’t mean that it’s trivial to add your own wacky control or sensor elements to the system, but that it’s relatively straightforward, and that it accommodates you. If your use case isn’t already covered, there is probably good documentation available to help guide you in the right direction, and that’s all a hacker really needs. As evidence for why you might care, take the RTL-HAOS project that we covered this week, which adds nearly arbitrary software-defined radio functionality to your setup.

And contrast this with many commercial systems that are hard to hack on because they are instead focused on making sure that the least-common-denominator user is able to get stuff working without even reading a single page of documentation. They are so focused on making everything that’s in-scope easy that they spend no thought on expansion, or worse they actively prevent it.

Of course, it’s not trivial to make a system that’s both extremely flexible and relatively easy to use. We all know examples where the configuration of even the most basic cases is a nightmare simply because the designer wanted to accommodate everything. Somehow, Home Assistant has managed to walk the fine line in the middle, where it’s easy enough to use that you don’t have to be a wizard, but that you can make it do what you want if you are, and hence it got spontaneous hat-tips from both Al and myself. Food for thought if you’re working on a complex system that’s aimed at the DIY / hacker crowd.

Something New Every Day, Something Relevant Every Week?

December 6, 2025 by Elliot Williams 41 Comments

The site is called Hackaday, and has been for 21 years. But it was only for maybe the first half-year that it was literally a hack a day. By the 2010s, we were putting out four or more per day, and in the later 20-teens, we settled into our current cadence of eight hacks per day, plus some original pieces over the top. That’s a lot of hacks per day! (But “Eight-to-Ten-Hacks-a-Day” just isn’t as catchy.)

With that many posts daily, we also tend to reach out to a broader array of interests. Quite simply, not every hack is necessarily going to be just exactly what you are looking for, but we wouldn’t be writing it up if we didn’t think that someone was looking for it. Maybe you don’t like CAN bus hacks, but you’re into biohacking, or retrocomputing. Our broad group of writers helps to make sure that we’ll get you covered sooner or later.

What’s still surprising to me, though, is that a couple of times per week, there is a hack that is actually relevant to a particular project that I’m currently working on. It’s one thing to learn something new every day, and I’d bet that I do, but it’s entirely another to learn something new and relevant.

So I shouldn’t have been shocked when Tom and I were going over the week’s hacks on the podcast, and he picked an investigation of injecting spray foam into 3D prints. I liked that one too, but for me it was just “learn something new”. Tom has been working on an underwater ROV, and it perfectly scratched an itch that he has – how to keep the top of the vehicle more buoyant, while keeping the whole thing waterproof.

That kind of experience is why I’ve been reading Hackaday for 21 years now, and it’s all of our hope that you get some of that too from time to time. There is a lot of “new” on the Internet, and that’s a wonderful thing. But the combination of new and relevant just can’t be beat! So if you’ve got anything you want to hear more about, let us know.