[Tech Time Traveller] has a good deal of voices in his head this 7 days, and most of them are concerned about his wife’s reaction to him acquiring other people’s rubbish. We don’t blame him, nevertheless. He purchased it from an estate sale and it was billed as a Tv typewriter. The device appeared fully homebrewed from somewhere around the late 1970s to the early 1980s. It is made up of a mess of parts of course hand-created in a mix of neat design and messy wiring.
[Tech] videos most of his exams and exploration to get the issue working and examined. Offered its age and construction, it labored amazingly perfectly, despite the fact that it did get a very little get the job done to get it back to finish purpose. In point, he purchased the machine a few yrs back and is finally getting around to finishing the job and putting jointly the video.
The terminal experienced a pretty odd Molex connector with a lacking pin that matched the SWTP 6800’s serial port. A small investigation unveiled that the very same estate sale experienced bought a 6800-based laptop, also. The keyboard itself was really a thing you could obtain at Radio Shack for a while. We speculate how many of them received used and how many just sat on shelves until eventually they were junked.
You have to surprise what the story is behind this product and the matching personal computer. It took a wonderful deal of ability to make one thing like this again in the day. Right now, you could simply do some thing like this utilizing off-the-shelf stuff. You have to surprise if nearly anything you are building nowadays will be on the subsequent generation’s edition of YouTube in the calendar year 2070. Almost certainly not.
Tv typewriters were definitely a issue, launched by a well-known reserve by [Don Lancaster]. When you glance at all the circuitry needed, it is astounding to think you can now fit a complete laptop or computer inside a thing like this.