Hackaday Links: April 12, 2020

What “Hackaday Links” Really Captures (Beyond the Links)

Hackaday’s links columns are less “here are some URLs” and more “here’s what the technical universe was arguing
about this week.” They connect dots between disciplines that usually don’t share a group chat: government
mainframes and modern web traffic, aerospace branding and launch milestones, rapid PCB fabrication and emergency
hardware, and radio propagation that depends on the atmosphere behaving like a surprise waveguide.

April 12, 2020 was especially sharp because the links weren’t random. They all pointed to the same theme:
old systems meet new pressure. Sometimes the old system breaks. Sometimes it bends. Sometimes it
wins a record.

Link #1: COBOL’s “Wait, You’re Still Here?” Moment

The setup: unemployment claims slam legacy systems

The post opens with a Y2K flashback, because nothing says “this is serious” like dragging a 20-year-old panic out
of storage and plugging it back in. During Y2K, companies famously hunted down COBOL developers to patch systems
that used two-digit years. In April 2020, a different bugCOVID-19created a different kind of deadline:
unemployment claims were skyrocketing, and many states’ unemployment insurance back ends were still driven by
mainframe-era architectures and COBOL code.

New Jersey became the headline example. The public learned (often for the first time) that a huge chunk of
government and financial infrastructure runs on software that’s older than the microprocessor. The governor’s
call for COBOL help wasn’t a nostalgia project; it was a capacity-and-change problem happening at emergency speed.

COBOL wasn’t the villainscale and change were

The funniest (and most frustrating) part of that moment was how quickly the internet tried to “solve” it with a
single scapegoat: “COBOL is ancient, therefore COBOL is the problem.” In reality, legacy systems often fail for
modern reasons:

• Traffic spikes: front ends get hammered, queues back up, and “good enough” capacity planning
  collapses under unprecedented demand.
• Policy changes: unemployment rules changed rapidly, especially with new federal relief, and
  code changes had to land fast.
• Interconnected components: web servers, app servers, databases, and mainframes form a system.
  A slow or fragile part anywhere can domino.
• Operational risk: you can’t “just rewrite it” when it’s paying benefits, moving money, and
  generating legally important records.

That’s why the story turned toward training and coordination. IBM and the Open Mainframe community pushed
resources to help connect experienced COBOL programmers with statesand to help new learners get up to speed.
The problem wasn’t that COBOL existed; it was that changing mission-critical systems quickly is hard, and
emergencies don’t wait for your next major version release.

What modern teams can learn from a 60-year-old language

The COBOL episode is a master class in engineering humility:

• “Old” can mean “battle-tested.” Many mainframe systems are reliable because they were designed
  for consistency and correctness, not trendiness.
• Interfaces outlive implementations. The scary part isn’t the languageit’s everything bolted
  around it, including data formats, business rules, and the human processes the software encodes.
• Resilience beats reinvention during a crisis. In April 2020, the right move was often “stabilize
  and adapt,” not “rip and replace.”

If you’ve ever inherited a codebase that “should’ve been rewritten years ago,” you already understand why COBOL
was suddenly trending. It wasn’t a comeback tour. It was simply still doing its jobwhile everyone else finally
noticed.

Link #2: NASA Revives the “Worm” Logo (Because Engineers Have Feelings Too)

Worm vs. meatball: branding as a progress indicator

Next up: NASA brought back its “worm” logothe sleek, red, 1970s-era logotype that looks like it was designed on
graph paper during a very confident coffee break. The worm had been retired from official use in the early 1990s,
replaced by the more illustrated “meatball” insignia.

In 2020, the worm returned in a context that was anything but cosmetic: it was associated with the return of
launching astronauts from U.S. soil on U.S. commercial vehicles again, via SpaceX’s Crew Demo-2 era. In other
words, NASA wasn’t just reviving a logoit was putting a “new chapter” sticker on a major milestone.

Why this matters (even if you “don’t care about logos”)

Engineers love to pretend we’re immune to branding. We are not. Symbols become shorthand for moments:
first launches, first fixes, first successful prototypes, first time the thing didn’t catch fire. NASA’s worm
returning wasn’t only a design choiceit was a morale and narrative move. It signaled forward momentum during a
year when a lot of people felt like time had turned into soup.

Also, it’s a reminder that technical projects are still human projects. We ship hardware with labels, we name
versions, we choose colors for PCBs, we make enclosures look nice, and we absolutely keep a sticker drawer “for
professional reasons.” NASA just did that at rocket scale.

Link #3: Free PCBs and Stencils for COVID-19 Prototypes

When hardware meets urgency, iteration becomes the whole game

The links post also spotlighted a practical kind of heroism: manufacturing support for pandemic-related
prototyping. Specifically, Aisler offered free PCBs and stencils for open projects aimed at helping during
COVID-19. That might sound like a small perkuntil you’ve ever tried to move from “breadboard proof-of-concept” to
“repeatable hardware” under a deadline.

In a crisis, the bottleneck is rarely “ideas.” It’s execution: parts availability, assembly consistency, and
the ability to iterate fast without draining a budget. Quick-turn PCB fabrication plus a stencil can turn “one
working board” into “ten boards that behave the same way,” and that’s the difference between a neat experiment
and something you can actually deploy, test, and improve.

Why stencils matter more than their boring name suggests

A stencil is the unglamorous superhero of surface-mount assembly. It lets you apply solder paste accurately and
consistently across pads, which means:

• fewer tombstoned parts (the tiny components that stand up like they’re offended),
• better reflow results,
• less time “hand-fixing” bridges and cold joints,
• and more time actually testing the circuit instead of practicing your rework technique.

During the early pandemic, maker communities were building everything from sensors and data displays to PPE
accessories and emergency-adjacent devices. The best efforts took safety seriously: open documentation, careful
validation, and a clear understanding of what a hobby-grade build can and cannot safely do. Offers like free PCBs
and stencils didn’t magically solve the hard partsbut they helped people reach the stage where the hard parts
could be confronted with real hardware in hand.

Open hardware: fast, collaborative, and not magically risk-free

If there’s one lesson from that era, it’s this: open-source hardware can accelerate learning and iteration, but
it doesn’t replace responsible engineering. “Open” is a force multiplier for collaborationyet real-world devices
still need testing, documentation, and careful boundaries about intended use. April 2020 was the moment many
builders learned that the distance between a Git repository and a safe deployment is measured in verification.

Link #4: A 70-cm Transatlantic ContactWithout a Satellite (Yes, Really)

Why this is wild: 70 cm is usually line-of-sight

The final link in the post is pure “physics flex.” Amateur radio operators made what was reported as the first
direct transatlantic contact on the 70-centimeter band (around 432 MHz), using FT8. Under normal conditions,
70 cm is mostly a line-of-sight band. It’s great for local/regional work, repeaters, and certain specialized
modesbut not “hello across the ocean” without help.

The contact involved stations on Guadeloupe (FG8OJ) and Cape Verde (D4VHF), spanning roughly 3,867 km. The likely
propagation mechanism was ductingconditions in the lower atmosphere that can trap and guide VHF/UHF signals far
beyond the radio horizon, especially over water.

FT8: small transmissions, huge reach

FT8 is a digital mode designed for weak-signal communication. It’s time-synchronized, highly structured, and
built to decode signals that would be unintelligible to the human ear. You can think of it as “radio with a
spreadsheet’s sense of order.” It trades conversational freedom for reliability under poor conditionsand for
record attempts, that trade is delicious.

This is one of those moments where software and nature cooperate: the atmosphere creates a rare propagation
path, and the mode is efficient enough to exploit it. Old-school hams call it magic. Engineers call it “a
temporary refractive waveguide in the troposphere.” Both are correct.

Why the ham world cares (beyond bragging rights)

Records are fun, but the deeper point is this: amateur radio is a living laboratory. People experiment with
antennas, propagation, encoding, decoding, timing, and power constraintsoften with a rigor that looks a lot like
real R&D. And in 2020, while the world was stuck indoors, a lot of experimentation moved forward anyway,
because radio doesn’t require you to be in the same roomjust in the same universe.

The Hidden Theme of April 12, 2020: Old Systems Under New Pressure

Put these links together and you get a portrait of April 2020 in four snapshots:

• COBOL and unemployment systems: infrastructure reveals its age when demand spikes.
• NASA’s worm logo: symbols return when a new era needs a banner.
• Free PCBs/stencils: rapid iteration becomes a form of community support.
• 70-cm transatlantic contact: constraints bend when conditions and technique align.

That’s why this particular Hackaday Links post still reads well years later. It’s not just “what happened this
week.” It’s “how systems behave when the environment changes abruptly”which is basically the plot of every good
engineering story ever.

How to Read a Links Roundup Like a Builder

If you want to extract more value from posts like “Hackaday Links: April 12, 2020,” read them as prompts, not
headlines. Try these questions:

• Where is the real bottleneck? (COBOL wasn’t the only issue; scaling and change management were.)
• What’s the “boring” tool that makes everything work? (Hello, solder stencils.)
• What assumptions are we making about limits? (70 cm is “line-of-sight”… until it isn’t.)
• What’s the human layer? (NASA didn’t just fly hardware; it told a story people could rally around.)

Those questions keep your brain in “systems mode,” which is exactly where it needs to be if you’re building
anything that touches real userswhether your users are unemployment claimants, astronauts, makers, or operators
chasing a rare propagation window.

Conclusion: A Time Capsule With Solder Smoke (and a Red Worm)

April 12, 2020 was a strange moment: the world felt paused, but technology was moving at two speeds at once. Some
things moved painfully slowlygovernment systems strained, supply chains rattled, processes creaked. Other things
moved quicklycommunities formed overnight, manufacturers offered support, and experimenters kept pushing boundaries.

That’s what makes “Hackaday Links: April 12, 2020” worth revisiting. It captures a week when the future didn’t
arrive as a sleek product launch. It arrived as a patch, a stencil, a revived logo, and a radio signal surfing a
temporary atmospheric hallway across the Atlantic.

Experience Add-On: What April 2020 Felt Like for Makers (About )

If you built things in April 2020even casuallythere’s a decent chance your “workbench” was also your kitchen
table, and your parts organizer was also a source of emotional stability. The outside world was unpredictable, so
projects became a tiny pocket of control: plug it in, measure it, fix it, repeat. The feedback loop was comforting
in a way that news alerts never were.

You probably remember the weird logistics: shipping delays that turned a simple resistor order into a slow-motion
drama, and stock shortages that forced creative substitutions. Suddenly, “use whatever you have on hand” wasn’t a
fun maker sloganit was reality. People learned to read datasheets with the intensity of a mystery novel because
the exact part they wanted was gone, and the only available alternative had a slightly different footprint and a
suspiciously cheerful marketing name.

Collaboration changed shape, too. Instead of huddling around a bench, you posted scope screenshots, photos of
bodge wires, and hand-drawn schematics to strangers who became teammates. Advice traveled faster than packages.
Someone across the country could spot your error from a single blurry image: “That’s a pull-up, not a pull-down,”
delivered with the confidence of a person who has absolutely made the same mistake at 2 a.m.

And then there was the emotional whiplash of building “pandemic-adjacent” hardware. Even small projects carried a
new kind of seriousness. You weren’t just optimizing for performanceyou were thinking about safety,
reproducibility, and unintended consequences. Makers got better at writing documentation because someone else might
actually rely on it. You learned to label files clearly, explain assumptions, and separate “prototype” from
“validated,” because those words mattered.

Meanwhile, the internet served up the kind of tech stories that made you laugh and groan in the same breath:
COBOL developers being summoned like legendary wizards, NASA dusting off a retro logo as if to say “we’re still
going,” and ham radio operators quietly accomplishing things that sound fake unless you know how propagation
works. It was comforting to see competence persistwhether it was a mainframe chugging through benefit payments,
a rocket program moving forward, or an FT8 signal getting decoded at an ocean’s distance.

Looking back, the most “April 2020” feeling might be this: the world was heavy, but your projects were light
enough to lift. You couldn’t control everything, but you could control a circuitone solder joint at a time. And
for a lot of people, that was not just a hobby. It was how you stayed steady.