Retro Gadgets: Pay TV In The 1960s

March 8, 2024 by Al Williams 19 Comments

These days, paying for TV programming is a fact of life. You pay your cable company or some streaming service and the only question is do you want Apple TV and Hulu or would you rather switch one out for NetFlix? But back in the 1960s, paying for TV seemed unthinkable and was quite controversial. Cable TV systems were rare, and the airwaves were a public resource, so allowing someone to charge to watch TV on the public airwaves was hard to imagine. That was the backdrop behind the Telemeter — an early attempt to monetize TV programming that was more like a pay phone than a modern streaming service.

[Lothar Stern] wrote about the device in the November 1959 issue of Popular Mechanics (see page 220). The device looked like a radio that sat on top of your TV. It added a whopping three pay-TV channels, and inside was a coin box, and — no kidding — a tape punch or recorder. These three channels were carried from a Telemeter studio over what appears to be a dedicated cable strung on existing phone poles.

Of course, TVs with coin boxes were nothing new. But those TVs were found in public places, airports, and hotels. The money was simply to turn the TV on for a set amount of time. This was different. A set-top box unscrambled channels delivered over a dedicated cable. Seems like old hat today, but a revolutionary idea in 1959.

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PC AT mainboard with both 16-bit ISA and 32-bit PCI slots. (Credit: htomari, Flickr)

How Intel Gave Us The PCI Bus While Burying VESA’s VL-Bus

February 15, 2024 by Maya Posch 39 Comments

Gigabyte GA486IM mainboard from 1994 with ISA, VLB and PCI slots. (Credit: Rjluna2, Wikimedia)

The early days of home computing were quite a jungle of different standards and convoluted solutions to make one piece of hardware work on as many different platforms as possible. IBM’s PC was an unexpected shift here, as with its expansion card-based system (retroactively called the ISA bus) it inspired a new evolution in computers. Of course, by the early 1990s the ISA bus couldn’t keep up with hardware demands, and a successor was needed. Many expected this to be VESA’s VLB, but as [Ernie Smith] regales us in a recent article in Tedium, Intel came out of left field with its PCI standard after initially backing VLB.

IBM, of course, wanted to see its own proprietary MCA standard used, while VLB was an open standard. One big issue with VLB is that it isn’t a new bus as such, but rather an additional slot tacked onto the existing ISA bus, as it was then called. While the reasoning for PCI was sound, with it being a compact, 32-bit (also 64-bit) design with plug and play and more complex but also more powerful PCI controller, its announcement came right before VLB was supposed to be announced.

Although there was some worry that having both VLB and PCI in the market competing would be bad, ultimately few mainboards ended up supporting VLB, and VLB quietly vanished. Later on PCI was extended into the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) that enabled the GPU revolution of the late 90s and still coexists with its PCIe successor. We covered making your own ISA and PCI cards a while ago, which shows that although PCI is more complex than ISA, it’s still well within the reach of today’s hobbyist, unlike PCIe which ramps up the hardware requirements.

Top image: PC AT mainboard with both 16-bit ISA and 32-bit PCI slots. (Credit: htomari, Flickr)

Sprint: The Mach 10 Magic Missile That Wasn’t Magic Enough

February 13, 2024 by Lewin Day 75 Comments

Defending an area against incoming missiles is a difficult task. Missiles are incredibly fast and present a small target. Assuming you know they’re coming, you have to be able to track them accurately if you’re to have any hope of stopping them. Then, you need some kind of wonderous missile of your own that’s fast enough and maneuverable enough to take them out.

It’s a task that at times can seem overwhelmingly impossible. And yet, the devastating consequences of a potential nuclear attack are so great that the US military had a red hot go anyway. In the 1970s, America’s best attempt to thwart incoming Soviet ICBMs led to the development of the Sprint ABM—a missile made up entirely of improbable numbers.

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Vesuvius Challenge 2023 Grand Prize Awarded And 2024’s New Challenge

February 7, 2024 by Maya Posch 7 Comments

In the year 79 CE, a massive cloud of volcanic ash rained down on the Roman city of Herculaneum after an eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Along with the city of Pompeii, Herculaneum was subsequently engulfed and buried by a pyroclastic flow that burned everything in its path, including the scrolls in the library of what today is known as the Villa of the Papyri. After the charred but still recognizable scrolls were found in the 18th century, many fruitless attempts were made to recover the text hidden within these charred ruins, but not until 2023 did we get our first full glimpse at their contents, along with the awarding of the Vesuvius Challenge 2023.

We previously covered the run-up to this award, but with only a small fraction of the scrolls now read, there’s still a long way to go. This leads to the 2024 prize challenge, which sees teams strive to read 90% of scrolls 1-4 each, for a $100,000 award. The expectation is that with this ability, it should be possible to read all 800 scrolls known today, but as detailed in the Master Plan there is still more to come. Being able to scan and process scrolls faster and more efficiently is one of the biggest challenges, as is that of recovering any more scrolls that may be stuck in the mud at the Villa of the Papyri. As easy as it may sound to pull stuff out of the mud, archaeological excavations are expensive and time-consuming.

With time running out on how long both the recovered and still lost scrolls will last, it’s pertinent that we do not lose this opportunity to double our knowledge of historical texts from this era.

The World’s First Microprocessor: F-14 Central Air Data Computer

January 30, 2024 by Maya Posch 34 Comments

When the Grumman F-14 Tomcat first flew in 1970, it was a marvel. With its variable-sweep wing, twin tail, and sleek lines, it quickly became one of the most iconic jet fighters of the era — and that was before a little movie called Top Gun hit theaters.

A recent video by [Alexander the ok] details something that was far less well-documented about the plane, namely its avionics. The Tomcat was the first aircraft to use a microprocessor-driven flight system, as well as the first microprocessor unit (MPU) ever demonstrated, beating the Intel 4004 by a year. In 1971, one of the designers of the F-14’s Central Air Data Computer (CADC) – [Ray Holt] – wrote an article for Computer Design magazine that was naturally immediately classified by the Navy until released to the public in 1998.

The MPU in the CADC is called the Garrett AiResearch MP944, and consists of a number of ICs that together form a full computer. These were combined in the CADC with additional electronics to control many elements of the airplane automatically, including the weapons system and the variable-sweep wing configuration. This was considered to be essential based on experiences with the F-111 and its very complex electromechanical flight computer, which was an evolution of the 1950s-era Bendix CADC.

The video goes through the differences between the 4-bit Intel 4004 and the 20-bit MP944, questioning whether the 4004 is even really an MPU, the capabilities of the MP944 and its system architecture. Ultimately the question of ‘first’ and that of ‘what is an MPU’ will always be somewhat fuzzy depending on your definitions, but there is no denying that the MP944 was a marvel of large-scale integration.

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Tech In Plain Sight: Escalators

January 29, 2024 by Al Williams 36 Comments

If you are designing a building and need to move many people up or down, you probably will at least consider an escalator. In fact, if you visit most large airports these days, they even use a similar system to move people without changing their altitude. We aren’t sure why the name “slidewalk” never caught on, but they have a similar mechanism to an escalator. Like most things, we don’t think much about them until they don’t work. But they’ve been around a long time and are great examples of simple technology we use so often that it has become invisible.

Of course, there’s always the elevator. However, the elevator can only service one floor at a time, and everyone else has to wait. Plus, a broken elevator is useless, while a broken escalator is — for most failures — just stairs.

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Roman Dodecahedrons: A Mystifying Archaeological Find

January 29, 2024 by Maya Posch 120 Comments

Much about archaeology can be described as trying to figure out the context in which objects and constructions should be interpreted. A good example of this are the metal dodecahedrons (twelve-sided shape) which have been found during archaeological excavations at former Roman sites. Since 1739 over 115 of them have been recorded, most recently a fully intact copper specimen found near the Lincolnshire village of Norton Disney during the Summer of 2023 by a local group of archaeologists.

Two ancient Roman bronze dodecahedrons and an icosahedron (3rd c. AD) in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn, Germany. (Credit: Kleon3, Wikimedia)

As the Norton Disney History and Archaeology Group notes on their page, this is the 33rd example of one of these items found in what was once Roman Britain, lending credence to the idea that such dodecahedrons originated within the Gallo-Roman culture.

As for the objects themselves, the ones so far found were dated to between the 2nd and 4th century CE, are all made out of some kind of metal alloy (e.g. bronze), are usually a dodecahedron but sometimes different (e.g. an icosahedron with 20 faces), yet all are hollow and usually with a single large hole in each face. The dodecahedron found at Norton Disney was analyzed to consist out of 75% copper, 7% tin and 18% lead, with a width of 8.6 cm and weighing in at 254 grams.

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