Formerly BradH, this channel is primarily about my adventures with vintage computers and vintage technology. It will include documentaries, show'n'tells of vintage computers, builds, repairs - you name it!
Join me as we travel back through time and interact with the technology stepping stones that brought us to where we are today.
There are three buttons on the left side. Try holding down the back two at the same time during power up. You showed a 3 pin header on a cable inside the unit which I suspect could be a TTL level serial port. Find out which pin is ground. Connect a scope to one of the other two pins, turn the unit on, and look for signs of activity.
Every time I see this thumbnail I read “Mrsscribe” and wonder what the hell a fanfic sockpuppet scheme has to do with hard drives. EDIT: I also suspected the bricks were figurative bricked hard drives, the slow buildup to the literal shipped bricks was amazing.
My dad was a digital engineer in the memory department. he kept a lot of the things he worked on for me to play with so we have buckets of boards in our basement. I should let him know they might be worth something... and feel kind of bad for playing with them as a kid. He also kept a few of the dev models, including a display of the first solid state drive he built.
When you made the quote that it doesn't matter how old you are the U.S will prosecute you 🤣 they literally said on CNN the won't prosecute Biden because of his age.
When I was in college in NYC back in the 70's, I was a member of a computer club in Long Island. There were at least 3 people in the club who had built Mark-8's, and there were one or two under construction. At every meeting we would have people bringing in their machines and demonstrating them work. The MARK-8s sometimes played music either via a speaker hooked up to an output port, or by making noise on a transistor radio. I remember that two of those Mark 8's were expanded machines, housed in large cabinets (internal separate power supplies). I don't know if those were kits or home made PCBs. In an attempt to build a PIC-A-STAR amateur radio transceiver using DSP, I actually have made some of my own double sided boards using toner transfer. It's a bear to do. I first put the resist on one side and spray paint the other side to protect from the etchant. I then etch the board, I used a mix of 2 parts H2O2, with 1 part of Muriatacid (Diluted HCL, sold to adjust swimming pool PH). After the first side is etched, I removed the paint and the resist with mineral spirits. Now I drill a few key holes to help me align the second side toner transfer. The PCB design artwork has a few "bullet points" on it for this purpose. With the second side resist ironed on, I spray paint the etched side and throw the board in the etchant again. Again remove paint and resist, clean, dry. The PCBs I made were for high density SMT parts, through hole 'jellybean" parts, and the usual gang of connectors. The 100 mill through hole parts spacing actually ended up aligning close enough for the dual side layout not to short circuit, or not circuit. I used "Augat" sockets which stand proud of the board by about 1mm, you can solder these on both sides of the board. So homemade double sided boards are not impossible, but these day you will just use Kicad to design them, and send off to China to get them made.
There’s this high-pitched ringing in some sections of some of your videos where older TVs and other devices are turned on. I was wondering if in video editing it would be simple to remove the higher-pitched sounds. If not it’s fine, it’s pretty faint and I wouldn’t be surprised if that had already been done; it’s MUCH better than my CRT 😅 I just thought I would let you know.
Yes.. around 15kHz I believe. It is CRT whine and unfortunately at my age I cannot hear it. I have been trying to nail it with filters going forward but of course I have to rely on visual meters since I can't actually hear it for check purposes. On occasion I've had CRTs turned on off camera and didn't realize they were even there and so totally missed the opportunity to filter. Apologies!
0:56 those people dont know that theres several types of prototypes theres design drafts all the way up to a device that almost looks like the final product, with some differences
Why are these cases always like: this one guy living paycheck to paycheck accidentally took a snickers bar from the grocery store? 10 years in prison, he'll lose his entire house and will be forced to live on the street after paying a $600,000 fine. Rich guy stole millions of dollars and cost everyone their jobs which causes irreversible harm to everyone involved? 1 year in prison and a $10 fine. They'll suffer in their 6th summer home on their yacht.
My understanding is that the most important thing the Altair 8800 did was prove there was a real market for personal microcomputers. Once somebody makes money selling some new thing, there will soon be new, better things from other companies. Between The Woz looking at one and saying to himself, "I can make something better than that!" he did so, and Steve Jobs realized they could sell an improved version as a business. They incidentally convinced Commodore to do build their own, and Radio Shack was inspired to develop the TRS-80 as well. (For a while, the best selling micro was the TRS-80, because it was the only one with a chain of stores ready to sell it.)
I did hear of a story of a Hard Disk Drive Hardware Test Company Salesman who made enough percentage on a single sale to (I believe) Miniscribe to retire when he delivered the sales order. The HDD Company had just had an entire manufacturing run fail quality control and the Salesman knocked on their door that same day.
Back in the mid 1970's I had bought a 6502 CPU from a MOS Technology display booth at a computer show in Atlantic City. It's possible that the WOZ was there, and also bought the CPU for his Apple I at the same show (such was the time line anyway). I didn't know what to do with the chip, and a year later, at a similar computer show, I bought a set of rather large bare PC boards from OSI for their model 400 computer. The CPU board could be populated with 2 28 pin EPROMs, one or two PIA's, your choice of 6501, 6800, 6502, or 6100 (cmos pdp8!) cpu, and 1 kb or 2102 ram (8 or 12 bit wide). There was an uncommitted 40 pin socket position. I later got a 40pin IO/ROM chip (PIA+ROM) from MOS Technology that contained their TIM monitor (same as the DEMON monitor sold by James Electronics in a single board computer dev system). I also got 4, 4kb ram expansion boards (could be populated 8 or 12 bits wide) with 2102 chips, so I had a total of 13kb rom memory. I bought a single board terminal, I forget who made it, but it had a 32 or 64 character by 16 line display, and came with a keyboard. I found a suitable hard foam plastic cabinet for it, and a used B&W monitor with a good CRT in it. This was my first computer. I had tiny basic for the 6502, and a cassette tape drive (used NRZI encoding, NOT audio based). I never got the cassette drive fully working, it would record and play back, but would have needed a bit of hardware and software interfacing to get a serial file system working on it. I kinda wish I never sold that first hardware, would have been fun to get it fully working the way I envisioned, but I bought a Fugerson 'Big Board' Z80 board, and was gifted a bunch of 8" floppy drives, and I had a fully functioning CP/M system by 1980. I kept it until around 1982-3, when it was replaced by an XT clone.
Awesome story! I have a 400 bare board from OSI I hope to build one day. One 6502 machine I'd love to find from the early days is the JOLT, which used the TIM monitor I think. Super crazy rare though. I wonder if your TV Typewriter was the Bay Area TVT by electronics systems? I have one of those thanks to a really generous viewer.
@@TechTimeTraveller No, it was a rather professional looking thing, cost me about $200-300 for the terminal and keyboard PCB's already built and ready to put in a box. I'm familiar with the TVTs, and this was a generation or two ahead of them. I used that terminal for awhile with a basket case LSI-11 (PDP11/03) I got out of salvage piece by piece, when I worked at DEC in the late 1970's.
Ad the very least, try to replace the missing/damaged keycaps for usage. 3D print or something. IMHO, the first personal computer design would have to have been something that was published in a magazine with wide reach to the intended audience (popular electronics, electronics illustrated, radio electronics, IEEE spectrum, popular science, popular mechanics, etc). The design would have to have included enough information to make it possible for the reader to build it, parts would have to have been available from mail order sources, though not necessarily cheap. The 8008 cpu originally cost at least $50 in single unit quantity back in the 1970's, but could be found at Polypacks, a hobby mail order firm of that era. With that in mind the Mark 8, the Scelbi 8 were two of the available designs based on the 8008. You could buy a development system from Intel, which had a front panel and a bus with expansion boards (at a much higher price). Dr. Robert Suding, who founded the Digital Group, wrote an article about his own personal 8008 design in 73 magazine. The MITS Altair 8008 was the first mass produced product, this time based on the Intel 8080, and the rest is history. We must not forgot the other 'first' microprocessors from National Semiconductor (the IMP bit slice series which included the IMP4, IMP8 and IMP16, and single chip versions of these which included the PACE, which might have been the very first 16 bit micro processor), TI's TMS9900 16 bit microprocessor (first MCU in a 64 pin 900 mill package, before the 68000), the Signetics 2650 8 bit machine inspired by the Data General Nova, and the Fairchild F8 which became one of the very first micro controllers preceding the Intel 8048.
It was kind of rhetorical.. but I did get some answers in the comments from people in the know. Apparently it's not all on the writers.. often producers and such dumb down certain elements because they figure the average viewer doesn't know enough to notice.
@@TechTimeTraveller I designed one of the first Winchester disk controllers back in 1981. It used the 8x300... I likely still have the documentation for that somewhere...
This thing reminds me of some weird kitchen gadget nobody knows the name of anymore. Clearly it had some purpose, it was made for a reason, but nobody knows what it is, and the more you try to guess, the more you are confused.
I read the title and thought that they just shipped dummy drives that were shells weighted to what a full drive weighs. They actually shipped masonry bricks. Whew.
I wonder how the "it _must_ be unfinished bare PCB-levels of early to count as a prototype" people must feel about those who use "beta" to refer to literally any point of a video game's development before the final build, even calling any kind of unused content "beta content".
Wow I'm one of the 6 or 7 people that watched it. Was it released to the public no not really so it still falls under prototype in my view, it's a version of a prototype that is slightly finished but of the not yet variety.
Hm… ima rapid fire on few guesses Alt ctrl fn esc power at the same time Ctrl fn c p power same time Tab control fn power Control fn spacebar Those combinations with setup on the motherboard, its my best guess far as i see based on the keyboard
I don't understand why so many companies can't accept that there's no such thing as "infante growth", profits will plateau eventually! Just being profitable isn't good enough, every company has to be MORE profitable than last year...
I am impressed that the device at least managed to connect to the base station (even if nothing further happened). I have not reviewed all of the comments, but is there an "easy" way to dump the ROM? Obviously desoldering the chip is not an option...
