Film maker [David Greelish] wrote in to let us know about his recent documentary: Before Macintosh: The Apple Lisa.

The documentary covers the life of the Apple Lisa. It starts with the genesis of the Lisa Project at Apple, covering its creation, then its marketing, and finally its cancellation. It then discusses the Apple Lisa after Apple, when it became a collectible. Finally the film examines the legacy of the Apple Lisa, today.

The Apple Lisa was an important step on the journey to graphical user interfaces which was a paradigm that was shifting in the early 1980s, contemporary with the Macintosh and the work at Palo Alto. The mouse. Bitmapped graphics. Friendly error messages. These were the innovations of the day.

Apple began work on the Lisa Project in October 1978 but most of its design goals changed after Steve Jobs and his team visited the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) in November 1979. On January 19, 1983, the Apple Lisa computer was released by Apple. Two years later it was re-branded as the “Macintosh XL” and was converted to run the Mac system software. Ultimately, on August 1, 1986, the Macintosh XL (Apple Lisa) was cancelled, so as to not interfere with Macintosh sales.

But the Apple Lisa is not forgotten. These days they are collectibles which you can acquire for a few thousand dollars. They are considered a symbol and harbinger of the very significant shift to the graphical user interface which today is commonplace and perhaps even taken for granted.

There is a fun anecdote in the film about what we know today as OK/Cancel. In fact with the Apple Lisa that was originally Do It/Cancel, but it turned out many people read “Do It” as “dolt”, so during usability testing the users were asking “why is it calling me a dolt!?” Thus “Do It” became “OK”.

If you’re interested in the old Apple Lisa be sure to check out LisaGUI which is a browser-based emulator you can use to see what it used to be like.

Say what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about the latest heroics that revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which The Register goes into a bit. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.

That makes the fix to the thruster problem all the more ballsy, since the Voyager team couldn’t be 100% sure about the status of the primary thrusters, which were shut down back in 2004. They thought it might have been that the fuel line heaters were still good, but if they actually had gone bad, trying to switch the primary thrusters back on with frozen fuel lines could have resulted in an explosion when Voyager tried to fire them, likely ending in a loss of the spacecraft. So the decision to try this had to be a difficult one, to say the least. Add in an impending shutdown of the only DSN antenna capable of communicating with the spacecraft and a two-day communications round trip, and the pressure must have been unbearable. But they did it, and Voyager successfully navigated yet another crisis. But what we’re especially excited about is discovering a 2023 documentary about the current Voyager mission team called “It’s Quieter in the Twilight.” We know what we’ll be watching this weekend.

Speaking of space exploration, one thing you don’t want to do is send anything off into space bearing Earth microbes. That would be a Very Bad Thing, especially for missions designed to look for life anywhere else but here. But, it turns out that just building spacecraft in cleanrooms might not be enough, with the discovery of 26 novel species of bacteria growing in the cleanroom used to assemble a Mars lander. The mission in question was Phoenix, which landed on Mars in 2008 to learn more about the planet’s water. In 2007, while the lander was in the Payload Hazardous Servicing Facility at Kennedy Space Center, biosurveillance teams collected samples from the cleanroom floor. Apparently, it wasn’t very clean, with 215 bacterial strains isolated, 26 of which were novel. What’s more, genomic analysis of the new bugs suggests they have genes that make them especially tough, both in their resistance to decontamination efforts on Earth and in their ability to survive the rigors of life in space. We’re not really sure if these results say more about NASA’s cleanliness than they do about the selective pressure that an extreme environment like a cleanroom exerts on fast-growing organisms like bacteria. Either way, it doesn’t bode well for our planetary protection measures.

Closer to home but more terrifying is video from an earthquake in Myanmar that has to be seen to be believed. And even then, what’s happening in the video is hard to wrap your head around. It’s not your typical stuff-falling-off-the-shelf video; rather, the footage is from an outdoor security camera that shows the ground outside of a gate literally ripping apart during the 7.7 magnitude quake in March. The ground just past the fence settles a bit while moving away from the camera a little, but the real action is the linear motion — easily three meters in about two seconds. The motion leaves the gate and landscaping quivering but largely intact; sadly, the same can’t be said for a power pylon in the distance, which crumples as if it were made from toothpicks.

And finally, “Can it run DOOM?” has become a bit of a meme in our community, a benchmark against which hacking chops can be measured. If it has a microprocessor in it, chances are someone has tried to make it run the classic first-person shooter video game. We’ve covered dozens of these hacks before, everything from a diagnostic ultrasound machine to a custom keyboard keycap, while recent examples tend away from hardware ports to software platforms such as a PDF file, Microsoft Word, and even SQL. Honestly, we’ve lost count of the ways to DOOM, which is where Can It Run Doom? comes in handy. It lists all the unique platforms that hackers have tortured into playing the game, as well as links to source code and any relevant video proof of the exploit. Check it out the next time you get the urge to port DOOM to something cool; you wouldn’t want to go through all the work to find out it’s already been done, would you?

What would it be like to have to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in ten days? One that could be built entirely from locally-sourced parts, and kept oxygen waste to a minimum? This is the challenge [John Dingley] and many others faced at the start of COVID-19 pandemic when very little was known for certain.

Back then it was not even known if a vaccine was possible, or how bad it would ultimately get. But it was known that hospitalized patients could not breathe without a ventilator, and based on projections it was possible that the UK as a whole could need as many as 30,000 ventilators within eight weeks. In this worst-case scenario the only option would be to build them locally, and towards that end groups were approached to design and build a ventilator, suitable for clinical use, in just ten days.

[John] decided to create a documentary called Breathe For Me: Building Ventilators for a COVID Apocalypse, not just to tell the stories of his group and others, but also as a snapshot of what things were like at that time. In short it was challenging, exhausting, occasionally frustrating, but also rewarding to be able to actually deliver a workable solution.

In the end, building tens of thousands of ventilators locally wasn’t required. But [John] felt that the whole experience was a pretty unique situation and a remarkable engineering challenge for him, his team, and many others. He decided to do what he could to document it, a task he approached with a typical hacker spirit: by watching and reading tutorials on everything from conducting and filming interviews to how to use editing software before deciding to just roll up his sleeves and go for it.

We’re very glad he did, and the effort reminds us somewhat of the book IGNITION! which aimed to record a history of technical development that would otherwise have simply disappeared from living memory.

You can watch Breathe for Me just below the page break, and there’s additional information about the film if you’d like to know a bit more. And if you are thinking the name [John Dingley] sounds familiar, that’s probably because we have featured his work — mainly on self-balancing personal electric vehicles — quite a few times in the past.

The International Space Station (ISS) might not be breaking news, but this February, National Geographic released a documentary that dives into the station’s intricate engineering. It’s a solid reminder of what human ingenuity can achieve when you put a team of engineers, scientists, and astronauts together. While the ISS is no longer a new toy in space, for hackers and tinkerers, it’s still one of the coolest and most ambitious projects ever. And if you’re like us—always looking for fresh inspiration—you’ll want to check this one out.

The ISS is a masterpiece, built piece by piece in space, because why make things easy? With 16 pressurized modules, it’s got everything needed to keep humans alive and working in one of the harshest environments imaginable. Add in the $150 billion price tag (yes, billion), and it’s officially the most expensive thing humans have ever built. What makes it especially interesting to us hackers is its life support systems—recycling water, generating oxygen, and running on solar power. That’s the kind of closed-loop system we love to experiment with down here on Earth. Imagine the implications for long-term sustainability!

But it’s not just a survival bunker in space. It’s also a global science lab. The ISS gives researchers the chance to run experiments that could never happen under Earth’s gravity—everything from technology advancements to health experiments. Plus, it’s our testing ground for future missions to Mars. If you’re fascinated by the idea of hacking complex systems, or just appreciate a good build, the ISS is a dream project.

Catch the documentary and dive into the world of space-grade hacking. The ISS may be orbiting out of sight, but for those of us looking to push the boundaries of what’s possible, it’s still full of inspiration.

As a nerdy kid in the 90s, I spent a fair bit of time watching the computer-themed cartoon Reboot. During the course of making a documentary about the show, [Jacob Weldon] and [Raquel Lin] have uncovered the original digital master tapes of the show.

This is certainly exciting news for fans of the show, but there’s a bit of a wrinkle. These digital masters are all on D-1 digital cassette tapes which the studio doesn’t have a player for anymore. The dynamic duo are on the hunt for a Bosch BTS-D1 to be able to recapture some of this video for their own film while also heavily hinting to the studio that a new box set from the masters would be well-received.

As the first CGI TV series, Reboot has a special place in the evolution of entertainment, and while it was a technical marvel for its time, it was solid enough to last for four seasons and win numerous awards before meeting a cliffhanger ending. If you’re an expert in D-1 or have a deck to lend or sell, be sure to email the creators.

Feeling nostalgic for the electromechanical era? Why not check out some hidden lyrics on Digital Compact Cassettes (DCC) or encoding video to Digital Audio Tapes (DAT)?

[via Notebookcheck]

It’s weird to think that an abacus would have still been used sixty years ago, or so posits the documentary series The Computer and the Mind of Man. This six part series originally aired on San Francisco local television station KQED in 1962, a time where few people outside of academia had even stood next to such a device.

Episode 3 titled “The Universal Machine” was dedicated to teaching the public how a computer can enhance every type of business provided humans can sufficiently describe it in coded logic. Though mainly filtered through IBM’s perspective as the company was responsible for funding the set of films; learning how experts of the time contextualized the computer’s potential was illuminating.

The real meat of the episode was the interview with Dr. Charles Decarlo, who was the director of education at IBM at the time. He explained how a major obstacle to the progression of the medium was the development of programming languages like Fortran and Algol. How these programming languages are structured was a key point of emphasis as to distinguish them from spoken languages, because the order in which the words appear matters more to a machine than the context of those words. As much as we might like for our computers (and other humans) to understand sarcasm…it only complicates communication on the other end.

Everything in the documentary sounds appropriately science-fictiony. Lots of boops and bleeps paired with discordant strings are punctuated by that prototypical narrator voice over where everything is pointedly enunciated. Thanks goes to [William] for uploading the series to YouTube and for reminding us how great the acronym GIGO is. In other words, “Garbage in, garbage out.”

“The computer, the universal machine; in that it is capable of doing whatever we are capable of instructing it to do.”

– Narrator, The Computer and The Mind of Man (1962)

Also just in case you missed it, there’s another great Retrotechtacular post on crash testing trucks with a soundtrack that is everything you would hope it would be.

It may be hard to believe, but it’s time for the Hackaday Prize again! The 2023 Hackaday Prize was announced last weekend at Hackaday Berlin, and entries are already pouring in. The first-round challenge is all about “Re-engineering Education,” which means you’ve got to come up with a project idea that helps push back the veil of ignorance somehow. Perhaps you’ve got a novel teaching tool in mind, or a way to help students learn remotely. Or maybe your project is aimed at getting students involved and engaged. Whatever it is — and whatever the subject matter; it doesn’t just have to be hacking-adjacent — get an entry together, build a team, and get to work. The first round closes on April 25, so get to it!

From the “Stupid ChatGPT Tricks” department, this week we saw the wildly popular chatbot used to generate activation keys for Windows 95. While trying to scam the licensing engine of a nearly three-decade-old OS might sound like a silly thing to ask an AI to do, especially one geared to natural language processing, the hack here was that the OP, known as Enderman on YouTube, actually managed to trick ChatGPT into doing the job. Normally, the chatbot refuses to honor requests like, “Generate an activation key for Windows 95.” But if you ask it to generate a string that fits the specs of a valid Win95 key, it happily complies. Enderman had to tailor the request with painful specificity, but eventually got a list of valid-looking keys, a few of which actually worked. Honestly, it seems like something you could do just as easily using a spreadsheet, but discovering that all it takes to get around the ChatGPT safeguards is simply rewording the question is kind of fun.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bTXbujbsVk

Back in December we came across an outfit called WatchDuty, a non-profit wildfire alerting, mapping, and tracking service. WatchDuty provides near-real-time information on wildfires, which can potentially provide those living in wildfire country the time they need to get out of harm’s way. WatchDuty relies on a network of reporters who listen to first responders on scanners to get up-to-the-minute information to subscribers. Originally, the coverage area was limited to California, which of course is no stranger to wildfires. Now, WatchDuty is expanding to all the western states, and they’re looking for volunteers. If you’ve got experience listening to public service communications on scanners and you live in one of the western states, you might want to check it out.

Speaking of radio, we were turned onto a short documentary about amateur radio that’s worth a watch. Simply titled “HAM,” the film focuses on the amateur radio community in Montana (the film was produced by University of Montana students) and features Lance Collister (W7GJ), who made history in 1983 (as WA1JXN) when he contacted Owen Garriot (W5LFL) aboard the shuttle Columbia, becoming the first ham to make contact with anyone in space. The film is a good look at amateur radio and what it’s all about.

In that film, we were pleased to learn that director Grace Wolcott seems to have caught the radio bug and is now working toward her license. And while getting your license no longer requires learning Morse code, if she wants to take the dive, there would be worse ways to practice than Morsechat, the web-based chat system that uses Morse. Morsechat lets you practice your Morse skills by tapping out code using either a mouse button or the space bar and getting instant feedback on what you keyed. We didn’t try out the social feature, which allows you to chat in Morse with other users, but we gave the practice room a shot with a standard “CQ” message. That’s something that even the most Morse-less ham knows how to pound out by heart, but the message didn’t get decoded properly. It turns out that Morsechat is very fussy about the speed at which you’re sending code, and you need to adjust the WPM slider very carefully. Once you get it dialed in, though, it seems to work fine — although the space bar on a crappy old keyboard makes a poor substitute for a quality key.

And finally, we’d be remiss if we didn’t note that Tim Hunkin is back at it with a third installment in his “Secret Life of Components” series. This one looks like a doozy — the first episode, which looks at pneumatics, popped up on our feed a few days ago and we can’t wait for a chance to watch it. Happy viewing!