If you were interested in computers in the early 1970s, you struggled to get time on real computers since owning your own was all but impossible. In the middle of the decade, though, you could get a few computers: the Mark VIII, the Altair, the Apple I, and several others. Those were still pretty expensive, though. But in late 1976, an article in Popular Electronics said you could build a “powerful, expandable” computer for $80. The article in question was by [Joseph Weisbecker], who, unknown to most of us at the time, was actually the RCA employee behind the CPU — an RCA 1802. [Tech Time Traveler] takes a close look at the spunky little computer’s history in the video you can see below.
The 1802 was actually the second generation of the CPU, but the first that was all-in-one chip. [Weisbecker] started building the CPU as a personal project. He’d been a hacker even in high school, building relay-based tic-tac-toe games, among other things.
The first incarnation in his lab was “Fred,” with 100 TTL chips, and his idea was to have the computer be at least partially used as a video game — an interesting point, with Pong being very popular at the time.
After the [Slow Mo Guys] acquired a 168 TB Seagate LaCie Thunderbolt 3-based RAID storage system back in 2019 to store their video footage, they were obviously slightly miffed when suddenly it would just refuse to power up. Naturally the device was now out of warranty, the product itself no longer produced and Seagate support was less than supportive, ergo they sent the device to [Mend it Mark] 
A fun trick with a pole is to try to balance it so that it can stand on one end. This can be done in a few ways, such as by exerting a force on either end to counterbalance any force that threatens to make it fall over. The approach that [Peter Ryseck] chose was to cobble together what is 
