Retro Cool Technology

[Urwumpe]

This may be the best thread to put this?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-39471567

Really sad. His invention was really important for German history in the end... after all the TR-909 was one important factor in the Techno era.

And the TR-808 was even recently still mentioned in German pop music (Deichkind, "So 'ne Musik": "Drücken die ganze Nacht auf die 808" - "Pressing the whole night on the 808")

And you can't listen to the record of Marvin Gayes "Sexual Healing" without also hearing a 808 in the background...

 

[Andy44]

Ran across this video from 2009 about retro-tech. In a meta sort of way it's interesting because of how much "modern" tech in this vid is now itself obsolete. Eg. look at all the flip phones.

 

[Artlav]

Speaking of a somewhat more recent retro, i've been performing some necromancy on a corpse of an old fax machine, the sort that uses thermal paper.

It's an obscenely simple printer design - just a chip-on-glass strip and a stepper-driven roller, and i hope to eventually 3d-print a new case for it, small enough to fit into a pocket.

So far i stuck it full of logic probes, figured out the signals, then removed all the bulky 90's era guts and wired the business parts directly to a microcontroller.

TL;DR: Some techno-necromancy got me a slow B&W printer!

https://www.instagram.com/p/BV3GkS-F5F3/

 

[Notebook]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-40462275/fifty-years-of-colour-tv

Colour telly fifty(in the UK). Happy Birthday.
Remember it starting, used to show "trade test transmissions" during the day. They were made for telly-shops to demo the new colour sets.
Wasn't unusual to pass a high-street shop with dozens of sets showing the same prog. Well, BBC 2 was the only colour channel in the UK, for a while!

By a strange coincidence, just given a 22"PIL tube to a friend while clearing my flat for sale. Didn't think I'd ever use it...

http://www.readorrefer.in/article/Precision-In-Line--P-I-L---Color-Picture-Tube_12051/

Just for reference, the delta-gun is older, may have been the first mass-produced colour crt.
http://www.readorrefer.in/article/Delta-Gun-Color-Picture-Tube_12050/

 

[Ravenous]

I dimly remember my folks getting our first colour telly. Must have been mid-70s I suppose.

Funnily enough last weekend I was watching an old B&W programme from those days, which I only vaguely remembered:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Callan_(TV_series)

 

[Notebook]

Callan, takes me back. Done at the place I used to work at. Before my time, and all finished in the 60's I think.
Edward Woodward did a few things for Thames. A pilot for a series called Redcap, about military police C.I.D. types and another called Frontier. No record of Frontier, but I think Redcap turned into the Callan character.

N.

Edit: seems Callan was also done in colour, finished in 72.

 

[Urwumpe]

The most often repeated TV broadcast is still B&W here...initially aired 4 years before PAL became standard.

Luckily PAL was developed after NTSC and fixed the hue error issue.

 

[Notebook]

It was later than NTSC.
It really didn't fix the multi-path error problem, just changed it to a saturation error, so less noticeable.

There was an industry "Joke" going around regarding a commercial for ITT colour sets.

"Only ITT has Tint Control!", reply, "Only ITT needs Tint Control..."

Still gets a laugh
https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/comment/37578193

N.

 

[Andy44]

The original Twilight Zone in B/W is still broadcast on cable here in the US. ScyFy channel is doing a July 4th TZ marathon today if I am not mistaken. Color TV was certainly an advancement, but the move away from B/W spelled an end to a certain type of cinematography, unfortunately. Over the years they've tried to revive the Twilight Zone series, but they lacked two very important things: Rod Serling's brilliant writing, and black and white film.

You just can't beat B/W for Cold War paranoia.

 

[Andy44]

I think anything related to Project Gemini counts as retro tech, no?

This film shows really cool simulator hardware, and also is a good explanation of how listing re-entry works.

 

[C3PO]

I think anything related to Project Gemini counts as retro tech, no?

This film shows really cool simulator hardware, and also is a good explanation of how listing re-entry works.

Project Gemini Analog Re-entry Simulation ~ 1965 NASA; Spacecraft Flight Simulator - YouTube

Wow!

I watched that exact video 2 days ago. What are the odds?

 

[Andy44]

Wow!

I watched that exact video 2 days ago. What are the odds?

The user who posted that video, Jeff Quitney, posts a lot like that and they pop up in my recommendations all the time; probably yours, too. It doesn't surprise that Orbinauts all wind up watching the same youtube channels.

 

[C3PO]

It doesn't surprise that Orbinauts all wind up watching the same youtube channels.

I've been here since the M6 days, and this is the first time I've noticed.

 

[Andy44]

A while back I bought a science kit for kids thing whose main project was an Edison phonograph kit. It's mostly plastic and has a battery-powered motor and you record onto foil cylinders. Unfortunately it's a piece of junk and I could never get it to reproduce my voice no matter how hard I tried. It amazes me that Edison himself ever got it to work, given that he had no prior example to base it on.

Anyhow, I've been watching this guy's videos lately. He explains a lot of really cool technology history.

 

[Andy44]

Just what you need for your vinyl collection?

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pinkdonut/rokblok-a-new-spin-on-vinyl

N.

That looks pretty cool, but I notice that none of the photos or videos show the part of the device that comes into contact with the vinyl, which raises alarm bells in my head.

---------- Post added at 02:04 PM ---------- Previous post was at 01:53 PM ----------

For some retro type stuff that isn't really retro, check this out:

https://www.gramovox.com/

No, they don't show the traction system. As long as its not caterpillar-tracks, it'll be fine.

N.

So this was apparently released, and we were right to be wary of it; turns out it's pretty awful.

 

[Andy44]

More Mellotron Madness:

 

[Notebook]

Sort of retro...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-43001916/new-sega-mega-drive-game-made-on-90s-kit

A new game for the Sega Mega Drive console has been developed using the original tools, 20 years after the games console was discontinued.

 

[Andy44]

Sort of retro...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-43001916/new-sega-mega-drive-game-made-on-90s-kit

That sort of thing is becoming popular now. On 8-bit Guy's youtube channel he often talks about people developing bran new games for long dead platforms such as the Atari 2600 and the Commodore 64 and even more obscure ones, and he recently published a game of his own.

 

[Enjo]

I've talked recently with an old friend, who had published a game on Steam. He told me, that the competition there is so high now, that you can barely make your game visible these days.

That sort of thing is becoming popular now (...)

So could it be, that some game developers gave up competing for money and focus on pure fun and set themselves tougher goals in form of hardware limitations, to be more distinctive from the Steam / Unity "easy-peasy" crowd?

 

[Andy44]

Retro tech? Now THIS is cool retro tech. The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, restores ancient machines to full working order. Here they have a fully operational IBM 1401 from 1959 and they figured out how to run Fortran on it, which it was never designed to do. This thing is a giant, breathing, chattering beast and these guys put so much love into it.

And here they restored a 1959 DEC PDP-1: