System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardware
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI debugged a boot issue on the Apple Newton this way. The latest flash image was a brick on production hardware (no available LEDs, GPIOs, etc.) but not on development hardware. But I could flash a new OS image. So I wrote some small loops that did different stuff on the bus (so that they sounded different) and salted the boot path with them, then listened in on my portable AM radio. Found the problem inside of an hour by…
Generating music via radio interference goes way, way back. The IBM 1401 (1960's era) could do this:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EPk8MVEmiTI It could also play music on the line printer by banging out the right sequence of characters. http://mail.computerhistory.org/pipermail/1401_software/2009... Strangely, the 1401 radio music was later set to orchestra and released as a CD by an Icelandic composer: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7408766
I enjoy how everyone discovers this "feature." It really is a lot of fun to play with. True story, back in the cave person days, when television only came over the air waves and if you wanted to "own" a computer you shelled out anywhere from $500 to $5000 for something with an 8 bit processor that ran between 1 and 4 MHz and had, usually, much less than 65,536 bytes of RAM, peripherals for these things were few and…
Found as a link from Wikipedia, from the following article (6/11/2022): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking This HN article/these links -- are intended for proactive/defensive/ethical security & security awareness purposes only.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 1503
- Total comments
- 300
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016-03-01 | System Bus RadioFirst breakout | sssilver | 499 | 87 |
| 2018-01-17 | System Bus Radio: Transmits AM radio on computers without transmitting hardwareBest thread | yarapavan | 515 | 120 |
| 2020-12-17 | Transmits AM radio on computers without radio transmitting hardwareLatest 20+ point return | known | 476 | 92 |
| 2022-06-12 | System Bus Radio – transmit radio on computers without radio transmitting hw | peter_d_sherman | 1 | 1 |
| 2023-04-26 | System Bus RadioHall induction | xk3 | 4 | 0 |
| 2024-07-18 | Transmits AM radio on computers without radio transmitting hardware (Airgap) | punnerud | 8 | 0 |