We Had One of These...

Back in the '60s my family somehow acquired a gigantic boat of a car: a Chrysler station wagon.  It was equipped with a couple of gadgets that even then struck me as quite odd.  One was a push-button automatic transmission (no lever, just dashboard mounted push-buttons).  The other was a record player, exactly like the one at right.  I ran across this on Retronaut.

We could never play the darned thing, because we didn't have any of the 16.66 RPM records for it.  I don't even know if ours worked...

Rongorongo, et al...

Rongorongo?  What's that?

It's an ancient system of writing, and it's one of the few that have not been deciphered.  Modern science has done an amazing job of figuring out the meaning of ancient writings with no living readers, but some still remain a mystery...

Words and Phrases Based on Obsolete Technology...

That headline caught my eye, and I just had to go off and read the article.  I had to laugh at myself when I did, because I knew every one of these terms – and more related ones.  For the most part, that's just a simple reflection of my age.  For instance, I'm plenty old enough to remember when telephones all had dials, and you really did have to “dial” a phone number.

But the most interesting one to me was the post about terms related to typography.  In junior high school I took a class in Graphic Arts, which included a segment on how to manually set type.  For some reason I really can't fathom, I did really well at setting type – I could very quickly pull the individual letters from the “California job case” they were stored in, place them properly in a frame, use en- and em-spaces, use shims for the line spacing, and quoins (photo at right) to tighten them all up in the frame.  I loved operating the old-fashioned letterpress, and I could stand in front of it for hours feeding each sheet of paper in manually while the press was operating at top speed (20 sheets/minute!). I took that course in the '60s, and even then this equipment was on the verge of obsolesence.  I remember Mr. Mayer, the teacher, complaining that it was difficult to replace some of the type, and he urged us to be careful with them. 

I haven't thought about typesetting for many years, and yet all the old terms and gear came right back to mind.  I'll bet you I could still set type today, after a few hours of practice.  But the equipment may only exist in museums today...

Still Working After 40 Years...

Now this is cool – forty years ago, Jerry Lowe built this ring-counter based clock.  This is before microcomputers and before LEDs (and before most of my colleagues were born!).  It's still working.

Nice, Jerry...

Home-Brew 8 Bit CPU...

This is cool, but those of us of a certain age have been there, done that, before.  For that young feller, building a computer from scratch with a microprocesser is an exotic affair.  For me (and many others) in the late '70s and early '80s, it was the norm.  I've designed and built dozens of these – and that's not bragging, that's just the way you did things back then. 

There's a further step I'd love to take.  It's been on my “to do” list ever since Don Tarbell showed me his home-brew 8 bit computer back in the late '70s.  He didn't start with a microprocessor chip – he started with a blank sheet of paper and a TTL parts catalog.  He designed the instruction set, the CPU architecture, and every logic gate in the entire thing.  The result was something that would (barely) fit on a table-top, and operated at a speed that would be most unimpressive today – but it was all his design, from the instruction set on up.

I want to do that.  And someday, I will.

Listen...

Dedicated to my parents and my mother-in-law: