Dan Maloney and I were talking on the podcast about his memories of the old electronics magazines, and how they had some gonzo projects in them. One, a DIY picture phone from the 1980s, was a monster build of a hundred ICs that also required you to own a TV camera. At that time, the idea of being able to see someone while talking to them on the phone was pure science fiction, and here was a version of that which you could build yourself.
Still, we have to wonder how many of these were ever built. The project itself was difficult and expensive, but you actually have to multiply that by two if you want to talk with someone else. And then you have to turn your respective living rooms into TV studios. It wasn’t the most practical of projects.
But amazing projects did something in the old magazines that we take a little bit for granted today: they showed what was possible. And if you want to create something new, you’re not necessarily going to know how to do it, but just the idea that it’s possible at all is often enough to give a motivated hacker the drive to make it real. As skateboard hero Rodney Mullen put it, “the biggest obstacle to creativity is breaking through the barrier of disbelief”.
In the skating world, it’s seeing someone else do a trick in a video that lets you know that it’s possible, and then you can make it your own. In our world, in prehistoric times, it was these electronics magazines that showed you what was possible. In the present, it’s all over the Internet, and all over Hackaday. So when you see someone’s amazing project, even if you aren’t necessarily into it, or maybe don’t even fully understand it, your horizons of what’s possible are nonetheless expanded, and that helps us all be more creative.
Keep on pushing!
I really like these “Perspectives” style articles. I hope the HaD team keeps making them. They are either encouraging, and thought or discussion provoking.
A big part of what we do as hackers is see what is possible, either on a personal level, a budget level, or a technological level. It can also be a form of play, or art though. I commend the hackers pushing the limits toward science fiction, but I absolutely love projects that have personality or a creative twist.
The recent and goofy type writer post helped me solve a serious problem in an interesting and otherwise extremely cost prohibitive system. A lot of people didn’t like the video due to the colorful personality, but a solution to a different problem hit me like a wave while watching it. I am actually going for it – the theory checks out! Seeing examples of people thinking differently about a technological challenge, even if the source of inspiration is impractical or not immediately useful enriches me. These goofy things open up mental pathways for me to see solutions to real problems and play with the unknown more confidently.
For many systems we have taken a wrong turn. Or maybe in some cases a practical turn due to barriers that existed 50 years ago that no longer exist. Creating something from sci-fi is profound. But the first step is creating the sci-fi! A lot of sci-fi ended up being just for fun, sure it’s impressive when its fathomable, but the unfathomable suspended disbelief is the pool this all grew from.
Many of our greatest discoveries/inventions came from accidents, someone doing something objectively stupid at the right place and time, someone saying screw you to their rigid professor, a strange collaboration across technical disciplines, a “dirty-trick”/”cheap-hack”, a dream, etc.
I wrote all of this to request that we celebrate the cutting edge, but also, the weird and wacky. They are an ouroboros for me. Everyone has something to offer, and it is our co-creative spirit that drives all these things toward progress.
I am totally in agreement with the benefits of celebrating and exploring the wild and wacky! I suspect some of the pushback comes from dishonest representation though, and I think that is equally valid. It’s one thing for me to tell you about the time when I decided to try to mop the kitchen floor by attaching wet mops to my rollerskates, and we can both have a chuckle. It’s quite another for me to post a video “Is this the ultimate mopping hack?” that’s 20 mins long, in an attempt to get some views.
On the gripping hand, I’d absolutely watch “here are the 20 ways I tried to solve problem X that didn’t work out” so long as it was relatively respectful of my time – most video content is absolutely lower in content density over time than a blog post with some pictures. That’s honestly why I’ve been reading HaD for well over a decade – I get a few pictures, and a text overview that’s enough to spark the ideas, without having to deal with what passes for “engaging” video content in whatever year.
On the matter of “how many were built”, I think there are two answers. Of the non-trivial builds I suspect very few were built by hand, but sometimes quite a lot were built from the board or kit offered for sale (usually right there in the article). For instance, I doubt very many people scratch built Steve Ciarcia’s “Trump Card”, a Z8000 computer on an ISA card for the IBM PC. On the other hand, I imagine at least a few were made using the “partial kit” sold by Sweet Micro Systems. I also think a whole lot more were bought as assembled and tested boards from the same outfit. :-)
There was a while in there when I thought Popular Electronics might be in the PC board business.
yeah and the flip side is true…now that so many ‘hacks’ are obviously not only possible but trivial, viewing them doesn’t change the viewer
Wow, this was a really good take, Elliot. I love digging through the old magazines for inspiration. worldradiohistory.com is a wonderful resource for such publications. Predating the 80/90s magazines, Hugo Gernsback produced some incredible works, such as Electrical Experimenter, that are sure to induce nostalgic awe.
One part of hacking is using things outside of what the original creators intended the thing to be.
Hacking is working beyond the defined possible.
… and the Hackaday comment systems works beyond the expected – randomly attaching replies intended for the main thread to some post.
The above reply was pwned by HaD Cr3W using an 0Day from “Now That’s What I Call Exploits – Volume 1”
#+-“,. HaD Cr3W 2025, ExPecTorAtE uS .,“-+#
I had a friend who’d ask me to explain tech things when I was drunk. I’d free-associate the details I didn’t know and was right more often than I would’ve been sober. He thought it’d be interesting to ask me to explain how not-yet-existent things worked, then patent the results. I must check to see how his fusion-powered flying car company is doing…
knowing whats possible is a good start, it’s trickier cousin is knowing what is implimentable
and of course actualy starting somewhere….anywhere…and building momentum is how the possible gets done
pragmatism is your BFF
When I was in high school in the late 90s I stumbled across some old Electronics Now magazines my electronics teacher had stashed away, from the early 90s. In the stack was an article spanning several issues going over the build of the “Lawn Ranger” which was a robotic lawnmower. You would mow around the edge of the lawn as well as around any obstacles such as trees, and then the robot used a row of IR LEDs and phototransistors to follow the cut edge. You would either use a normal mower to mow the edge, or there was an additional control box you could build and steer the robot around the lawn.
It used I believe a Z80 CPU, and although it had a full bill of materials, you had to either buy a pre-programmed EPROM from a listed company, or you had to download an image from a BBS and burn it to your own chip. I wasn’t able to locate the company, the BBS was long gone, and Electronics Now didn’t have a copy of the file on their BBS or FTP site :( but since I was in the third-year advanced electronics class, among other things we used the parallel port on old computers (I had an IBM XT clone, 8088 with an 8MB RAM expansion card that was the entire length of the case and a 25MB hard drive) through an isolation board to control motors and read from sensors and such. So I worked out how to use the parallel port to do what the onboard controller would have done, only problem was this was 1999 and aside from some limited BASIC stamps, microcontrollers barely existed, and single-board computers that would run off a battery were either a laptop ($$$$$ even for an ancient one) or some industrial stuff that was also $$$$$$$ so I decided to try to do it with a Commodore 64 instead, but didn’t quite get the Commodore BASIC stuff learned in time to build anything. I Still have the magazines somewhere and have often considered what it might take to build a better-working modern version using an Arduino or a Pi Pico to control it…
One of the billionaires trying to revive the airships made a comment during an interview that has always stuck with me. Can’t find the exact quote but it was something along the lines of “We don’t hire experienced engineers because they haven’t learned what’s impossible yet.”
I think of that quote every time I hear some industry dinosaur say “its just not done that way because reasons…”. Engineering principles are great foundational data sets, but they shouldn’t be used to box in imagination. Burt Rutan is the perfect example of this.
That said, the OceanGate Titan submersible is an excellent example of when principles are flatly ignored.