Retro Cool Technology

[Artlav]

Here is some more valve porn for you.

This is a 1.5 megawatt pulse modulation tetrode (from some sort of a radar) that i picked up yesterday while browsing on a bazar:

You can clearly see the gold-plated grids inside:

I don't have anything to put 40 A at 33000 V into it, so i just plugged it into the same 555 neon blinker breadboard you see at the start of the thread.
And blink it did.

With the heater off, it remains functional for some time, but the incandecent light of the cathode is no longer here.
This is the interval where you can clearly see a beautiful blue glow between the electrodes, confirming that the shell remained intact since 1975 and there is no air inside.
Really hard to get on camera:

 

[Andy44]

Very cool Artlav (and I've never heard of "Coca Cola Light" in the US, BTW).

I have a tube guitar amp and you can definitely see that blue plasma glow when you energize it, even over the orange heater light. And yes, it's difficult to photograph:

There are videos on youtube of people creating X-rays with high voltage through tubes; I don't suppose that's a hazard with these things in general, is it?

 

[4throck]

That's the computer from my primary school.

My was close to white, turned brownish over time.

But I'm puzzled, since I thought the TC2048 was only made and sold in Portugal (it was a local ZX Spectrum official clone and about 99% compatible)

And speaking of ZX Spectrum, perhaps we could have a thread about vintage simulation games such as:

It sure looks fun for 1984

 

[Ghostrider]

We MUST have a thread about this! Like, "Orbiter's Ancestors" or something like that.

 

[Andy44]

Here is some more valve porn for you.

Got some good stuff, here. Mercury arc rectifier tubes. No mad scientist's lab is complete without one or two of these puppies!

---------- Post added at 01:10 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:07 PM ----------

It sure looks fun for 1984

I played that game endlessly growing up. Serious Atari time. The orbiter was supposed to be Discovery, BTW, I remember reading that in the instruction book.

 

[orb]

But I'm puzzled, since I thought the TC2048 was only made and sold in Portugal

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timex_Computer_2048"]Timex Computer 2048 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]

Timex Portugal sold the TC 2048 in Portugal [highlight]and Poland[/highlight], where it was very successful. Also, a NTSC version was sold in Chile.

 

[N_Molson]

Some of those items are quite Fallout-esque

---------- Post added at 07:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 06:33 PM ----------

My first one. It is sitting in a corner (litteraly) of my parent's house and still works perfectly.

Notice that it had both a cartridge port in a console fashion that directly booted the inserted game on power up, or the "Basic OS", and a 3'5" disc port ("thick", not like the PC ones), that allowed to run programs/games through the "OS" (you had to type "run nameofprogram" and it worked). The cartridge games worked the best, honestly. The disk-loaded programs were prone to loading errors, but they also could be more complex. The first space-related program I had was an astronomical software, that gave you the angles and the positions of the planets in the sky on 10,000 years or so. I was a bit young to understand it, but it worked well. Pure maths. There was some graphical display though, with stars as pixels with letters near them.

I never finished Burnin' Rubber, the cartridge "24h Le Mans" game that was bundled with the computer. It was insanely hard near the end, as a lot of games were. I also remember "Crazy Cars II", I loved that one because it allowed you to drive freely a Ferrari F-40 (nice car, certainly) on a road network that included Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. You had a map with the road numbers and all, police cars were trying to ram you and you had to go from town A to town B in a limited time, it was pretty cool (sadly, the computer resources did not allowed to render town).

But the game that impressed me as I was a young boy, and that probably ultimately led me to Orbiter and other simulations, was "F-16 Combat Pilot". It was a simulation as precise as the platform could provide. Display was reduced to the minimal to free simulation resources : 4 colors (you could have 16 !), the ground was a flat green surface with a grid of points to render the altitude and speed feeling (that was smart !), and all other assets, including airbases & planes, were wireframe. You had a nice cockpit view, with MFDs (GPS map, SMS, AA & AG radars AFAIK) and an impressive level of detail given the limitations. I also remember a cool loadout screen, where you could select a nice choice of ordinance (AGM-65D ; AGM-65E, AGM-88 HARM, Durandal, such refinements were awesome for the time).

Loadout screen

In flight

I remember when I tried it for the first times with my father (an aviation enthusiast). We weren't able to move the plane "or fire a single bullet", as he said it. The manual was very rich and it took us time to figure out the basics of flights, without speaking of using the weaponry systems.

Also the "combat environement" was correctly rendered, when you had to strike an objective in enemy territory, climbing above 500 feet was nearly suicidal as you suddenly got locked by EWR that sent you Mig-23, 25, 29, 31, SAMs, etc... When you kept low, flying too close of an enemy military base rewarded you by scary flak barrages, that was cool.

War Room map

Even landing was challenging. After crash (yeah it happened often) you had an analysis of what got wrong with your landing. I will always remember "Sink rate too high". That was my most common error. It was not rare to be surprised by a Mig on landing, so I was prone to "rush" on the runway. But the vertical & horizontal velocities were carefully tracked, and no off-runway was tolerated. It was strict military landing.

Notice the ILS ! (the cockpit is not the same than above, that was the Commodore 64 version, I think)

Pass over a runway

Main menu (mission selection, and YES there was a P2P Network Multiplayer mode !!)

Loading screen, 16 colors art !

Dev team : 3 people. Yeah.

Good memories

Then I got a PC, Compaq with 386 Processor, Win 3.1. Upgraded it to 486 with arithmetic coprocessor quickly. Then the Pentiums & Win 95 came in, but it took some time before I got my hands on one of those, I directly switched to Win 98 AFAIR (not a bad thing, indeed !)...

 

[Artlav]

And yes, it's difficult to photograph:

Nice...
You know, thinking about it in comparison made me realize that i was just slacking off calling it difficult with such a huge valve and it's big clearances.

Here, let me try again with proper setup.

Heater on, power off:

Power on, heater on:

And with heater off, as it cools down:

With it at almost cut-off cold the plasma turns completely red.
I wonder why that is?

Be aware that this is only roughly 0.0001% of power it's rated for.
I tried discharging some HV capacitors with it as a switch, and that produce a brilliant blue flash that is truly impossible to get on camera.

(and I've never heard of "Coca Cola Light" in the US, BTW).

AFAIK, these cans are of standard size everywhere, so it's still a valid reference.

I don't suppose that's a hazard with these things in general, is it?

High voltage only.
EM energy is proportional to voltage difference between the cathode and the place the electrons hit.

For regular 200-400V valves the emissions would be only 200-400eV - harmless, can't penetrate even the regular air.

Things get interesting with tens of KV - an old tube TV CRT stabilisation triode like 6S20S is rated at 25KV, and it emits enough soft X-rays even with glass around it that it was shielded and eventually replaced with different technique.

My modulation tube can also quite possibly produce a fair bit of X-rays if I put full 33KV across it.

But the real deal starts from 45KV and up, where there are usually only special tubes.

Defectoscopic X-ray tubes have beryllium window that allow soft X-ray out (glass still absorb most of them at this level), and soft X-rays are absorbed by tissues quite well (heat-wise, not ionizing-wise), so trying to get a shot of your hand from one can easily cost you a hand.

Medical X-rays are 100KV range, and they are hard X-rays that go through glass, tissues, etc easily - these are less directly harmful than soft ones (no heat, all ionizing), but they shine through anything, so you need actual shielding.

Got some good stuff, here. Mercury arc rectifier tubes. No mad scientist's lab is complete without one or two of these puppies!

These are really nice too.
Pity mercury is so stupidly toxic.

Some of those items are quite Fallout-esque

No wonder. Tubes are hard to kill by EMP or radiation.

---------- Post added at 23:56 ---------- Previous post was at 23:35 ----------

Here is the glow in 1920x1080, if anyone want a wallpaper

 

[Scav]

Artlav . . . forgive the intrusive question but what are your electricity dues like? :hmm:

 

[Artlav]

Artlav . . . forgive the intrusive question but what are your electricity dues like? :hmm:

The usual.
Power does not necessarily equal total energy consumed.

You can have a megawatt pulse laser that is only consuming 1 milliwatt*hour of energy per hour.
What matters is how long the thing is on, which the big stuff is rarely long.

 

[MattBaker]

Additionally russian electricity prices...probably cheaper than 90% of everyone else's.

 

[N_Molson]

/me still thinks Artlav lives in a RBMK nuclear powerplant... :stirpot:

 

[Urwumpe]

The usual.
Power does not necessarily equal total energy consumed.

You can have a megawatt pulse laser that is only consuming 1 milliwatt*hour of energy per hour.
What matters is how long the thing is on, which the big stuff is rarely long.

Still, a Megawatt pulse laser should approximately consume one kWh of power. :lol:, which means, you should not fire it too often, about 1000 times and you would have doubled my power bill.

 

[Andy44]

Still, a Megawatt pulse laser should approximately consume one kWh of power. :lol:, which means, you should not fire it too often, about 1000 times and you would have doubled my power bill.

If you have a megawatt laser, people give you your power for free, or else.

 

[Ghostrider]

you should not fire it too often, about 1000 times and you would have doubled my power bill.

I think I'd run out of targets way before that...:thumbup:

 

[4throck]

Another one of my favourite retro tech is mechanical TV:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_television


Here's Mr. Baird setting up his "televisor":

And here's the type of image it delivered:

The interesting thing is that the bandwidth used was low enough for transmission over a regular AM channel. So in was perfectly within the available "consumer" tech of the time.

An interesting side product of this mechanical scanning tech is of course the Fax machine. That was used for the Luna 3 images... and that's a subject for another post

 

[MaverickSawyer]

Nice...
You know, thinking about it in comparison made me realize that i was just slacking off calling it difficult with such a huge valve and it's big clearances.

Here, let me try again with proper setup.

Heater on, power off:

Power on, heater on:

And with heater off, as it cools down:

With it at almost cut-off cold the plasma turns completely red.
I wonder why that is?

Be aware that this is only roughly 0.0001% of power it's rated for.
I tried discharging some HV capacitors with it as a switch, and that produce a brilliant blue flash that is truly impossible to get on camera.

AFAIK, these cans are of standard size everywhere, so it's still a valid reference.

High voltage only.
EM energy is proportional to voltage difference between the cathode and the place the electrons hit.

For regular 200-400V valves the emissions would be only 200-400eV - harmless, can't penetrate even the regular air.

Things get interesting with tens of KV - an old tube TV CRT stabilisation triode like 6S20S is rated at 25KV, and it emits enough soft X-rays even with glass around it that it was shielded and eventually replaced with different technique.

My modulation tube can also quite possibly produce a fair bit of X-rays if I put full 33KV across it.

But the real deal starts from 45KV and up, where there are usually only special tubes.

Defectoscopic X-ray tubes have beryllium window that allow soft X-ray out (glass still absorb most of them at this level), and soft X-rays are absorbed by tissues quite well (heat-wise, not ionizing-wise), so trying to get a shot of your hand from one can easily cost you a hand.

Medical X-rays are 100KV range, and they are hard X-rays that go through glass, tissues, etc easily - these are less directly harmful than soft ones (no heat, all ionizing), but they shine through anything, so you need actual shielding.

These are really nice too.
Pity mercury is so stupidly toxic.

No wonder. Tubes are hard to kill by EMP or radiation.

---------- Post added at 23:56 ---------- Previous post was at 23:35 ----------

Here is the glow in 1920x1080, if anyone want a wallpaper

I am going to have to introduce you to my dad. He worked on vacuum tubes for 17 years. He would probably get a real kick out of seeing these...

 

[Izack]

Seriously awesome pictures and videos, Artlav and Andy44. Really sparks an interest in old analogue electronics.

 

[Andy44]

Speaking of old computers, Jöhan Jöhannsson is a musician whose dad worked on an IBM 1401 computer back when his government first bought one, so he composed a piece of music that uses a 1401 as one of the instruments. It's that synth sound in the beginning of this. It's so beautiful, it's almost like the computer is crying. I saw this guy live once in Philadelphia and am a huge fan.

 

[Artlav]

Really sparks an interest in old analogue electronics.

Yeah, they are surprisingly interesting.
Being largely obsolete, vacuum tubes can, however, let you do things that you just can't do the same way with modern components.

Take a plasma speaker, for example - a high voltage arc that makes sound.
These are typically relatively complex, you drive a flyback transformer with PWM to get an approximation of the sound - an IC or two, several transistors, the modulation and the HV production clumped into a single block.

With a valve, it's dead simple - one tube, one transistor to drive the grid, an HV source and a music player.

Because a suitably high voltage tube can modulate tens of kilovolts all by itself.
There are basically no transistors or other semiconductors in open sale that can do the same thing, and whatever speciality things were made are likely worth a whopping lot.

But a valve that can do this is under $5 new old stock.

They are, however, really tricky to tune, so the sound quality tend to be worse.
There are both cracking from excessively primitive driver, and the classic tube amplifier distortions (that people pay big money to hear, for some reason).

So, it's nice to know how this old technology work.
There is always a chance that a good idea in the future is just a good idea lost to the past.

---------- Post added at 00:03 ---------- Previous post was at 00:00 ----------

Still, a Megawatt pulse laser should approximately consume one kWh of power. :lol:, which means, you should not fire it too often, about 1000 times and you would have doubled my power bill.

Nah.
A dead simple TEA nitrogen laser produce pulses in the megawatt range.
But they only last for nanoseconds.
So, average power is just a few milliwatts - like a regular laser pointer.

---------- Post added at 01:17 ---------- Previous post was at 00:03 ----------

P.S.
If the picture above don't look simple, here are all the relevant parts after i cleaned the rest up.
Much simpler looking, and even sounds better now.