The "Typewriter" That Changed the World
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- Опубликовано: 29 сен 2024
- #vintagecomputer #electronics #typewriter Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter, introduced 47 years ago in the September 1973 edition of Radio Electronics, was a revolutionary innovation that cracked open the door to affordable home computing.
Lancaster's pioneering device excited legions of electronics enthusiasts who dreamed of having a computer, or at least a computer terminal, in their own home. Through clever design, Lancaster created a device that, for the first time ever, let a person put words on their TV set. The use of the TV set, something every household had, made it much more affordable than conventional terminals, or glass teletypes and ushered in a wave of innovation that led to the world we live in today.
This video covers the history, the inner workings, and takes you on a demonstration of a real, authentic TV Typewriter, albeit one built in 2018, modelled after Lancaster's prototype.
Link to more info, schematics and construction guide: deramp.com/swt... 
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Sorry about the background music!! This video was a bit of a learning experience.. it was only the fourth one I'd ever made, and the first where I was doing a 45 minute documentary with animations and such. I was still learning sound levels. The newest videos I think are finally dialing that in. But this is still my favorite.. Don Lancaster is a personal hero of mine and I felt the TVT deserved to be highlighted in its own right. I tried to do it justice. Thanks to everyone who gave this one a watch!
Please keep making content. You have what it takes. I really enjoyed this. Sub and Notified. Serious, there is a lot of trash out there, but your video was hilarious.
could you re-upload without the music? it is so bad
@Trigger TheSound I've been trying to figure out what to do about that. It's my 2nd major video and it suffered a litrle from my inexperience. The hard part is letting go of the views and comments. I wish RUclips allowed do overs. But I am definitely hoping to revisit this and the early videos.
@@TechTimeTraveller Meh, keep it as is, it's obviously a stepping stone and should be preserved as such. I honestly had no problem with the BGM, I feel it suits the homespun feel of the project. I LOVE your sense of humor too, nothing wrong with some laughter along with the history lesson.
I'm honestly surprised that your channel is this new, hoping to see MUCH more content to come from you. You got an instant sub from me from the last video I watched of yours... literally SECONDS before this one, that was the one you did on the "hard drives as bricks" fraud scandal which just had me DYING with laughter all throughout!
You love what you do and clearly know your tech history, so keep up the awesome work! 😍😅😁👍
This was a fantastic video, but the music made it really hard to concentrate on the content. I for one would love to see an alternative version without the background music.
Yet another video that makes me want a collectors item I don’t have the money nor space for, LOL.
Ikr
Oh yess... sesame street, that animation with the marbles numbers and flashing numbers... psychadelic. Excellent documentary! I didn't knew this was even in 70's before the micro's in the early 80's. I have respect for these people.
Don was the Man!
All Hail Don..
I've really enjoyed watching this and other videos on your channel. I especially like the humor - just the right balance in my opinion. The scene where you are reluctant to push the key then switch to a fireball was classic! Keep up the great work. I am a tad senior to your age. Built my Quest Super Elf when I was 12 - no internet - different world back then. These videos bring back so many memories.
Glad you enjoyed it! I enjoy doing the humor bits as they give me a chance to work with special fx. The TVT was definitely a ways before my time but I nonetheless find it very interesting. I guess you didn't hang onto your Quest Super ELF? Those are getting pretty pricey these days!!
I have that keyboard. I deisgned / build a PCB that interfaced with it, scanning rows. The parallel outout went into a Super Elf (1802) and was used for many years. Although the Super Elf was given away, I still have the keyboard.
I wish I had bought a couple more when they were cheap. The keyboard guys have gone crazy on them and they go for over a grand now. If you're talking about the Microswitch unit, that is. I ranted about that Honeywell unit in another video where the seller separated it and now no one wants the terminal itself because it has no keyboard. Oh well.. good news for you anyway since you have a valuable antique. If you ever bring it out feel free to email me some pics.. love to see those old 60s microswitch units.
I absolutely love to hear you talk about this. You are very good at describing key concepts with great visual aids, and it's clear that you put a lot of time into research and production. I'm currently planning my own Z80 based homebrew machine and I'm soon entering the breadboard phase, so I feel extra inspired by seeing the photos of your TVT build.
I was born in 1963 and Sesame Street didn't scare me when it came in 1969 😊 but the Emergency Broadcast System tests and the cymbal-playing toy heroin monkey PSA gave me nightmares! 😱
I don't know if anyone posted about this yet in comments but the most likely reason to have a cursor on/off switch was if someone was using this to title or otherwise add text to video. They would type out the information, turn off cursor, set the "Keep" switch, then record their video. It would look much cleaner than having a blinking cursor.
Ahhh.. that makes sense!! Thank you for that insight. I wondered.
@@TechTimeTraveller Thank you for the top notch content. 🙂
Pretty interesting! I never heard of these.
"First time someone typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on the screen right in front of them" was long before 1973. The Mother of All Demos happened in 1968 and apparently Engelbart didn't see word processing as remarkable enough to comment on, since he was already demoing much more impressive things like networking, the mouse and hypertext.
Yes absolutely. I have a couple of 'glass teletypes' that predate the TVT by a couple years. I was just taking aim at Woz's assertion that he got there first. That is how he put it in iWoz, however he has been quoted elsewhere saying something to the effect of same but 'on a home computer', which I think is demonstrably false also. But I think in terms doing it in the home, Lancaster was probably first.
OH GREAT AND MIGHTY TECH TIME TRAVELER, PLEASE FIND A PLACE THIS IS SOLD AT A REASONABLE PRICE. MOSTLY SOMEWHERE BETWEEN THE 30$-40$ PRICE RANGE.
@@TechTimeTraveller some Woz fans interpreted this as "a computer owned by a normal person" but when I pointed out the 1962 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LINC and showed the picture of it in Mary Wilkes' parent's home they claimed that since it was bought with grant money it didn't count.
The Apple I was just an expansion of a terminal Woz had previously built instead of a completely new project so I am sure he wouldn't consider the TVT to be equivalent, just as he dismissed the Altair as being the same thing as his 1971 Cream Soda computer (which it sort of was as first shipped and most certainly wasn't when in a reasonable configuration).
Many young home hobbiests could not raid into XEROX palo alto laboratory.....
Smalltalk 72 was already graphical, but yeah, it wasn't the garage box type of computer. It was pretty "high end" research.
The kind of research Apple then claimed and called their own research (at least Jobs did).
You deserve so many more subs. Your videos are like watching an interesting history lesson. Props to you.
In 1976 I was in high school electronics lab and my teacher said go to the tv studio they have a problem with the prompter for the in school tv channel. In the control room was a tv typewriter that was not working. I spent 2 months tinkering with it reading the manuals (Don's articles) to learn how it worked. I ended up getting it kind of working but is was very touchy. It also had a sync lock board so it could overlay on video. In the end I read almost every book Don would write. And would learn enough from his books to go on to design a 6502 homebrew system in 1977. I Fondly remember it as my first true intro into the digital world. It was much different then with no internet but we felt we were at the start of a new age... little did we know what was to come
This is a high quality, entertaining video.
I’m impressed with the whole thing, and that’s before I get to the subject itself - which is just fascinating. Really well done!
This is quickly becoming one of my absolute favorite channels. The quality is outstanding and the topics are fascinating and not talked about enough. I do hope you continue to make great videos!
Thank you! That means a lot to me! I have a bunch on the go. I plan to try and keep a schedule of every couple of weeks.. some will be bigger efforts like the TVT video (that one took about 100 hours), most will be things like show n tells, repairs, etc. I don't want to just crank out 'content' for its own sake though, so the schedule is not quite in stone... more like a goal.
In 1981 I interfaced a TVT (some later model in a single large board) to a homebrew 6800 computer that acted as a terminal for the University of São Paulo's Burroughs B6900 computer. This was in turn connected to two very large black and white TV sets that were placed in strategic places.
Previously students and professors stood in a physical line to use the computer and personally fed their cards into the reader and then grabbed their listing from the printer as that came out. This was replaced by rooms full of terminals and the line became virtual. The huge characters of the TVT were perfect for letting a person standing at the back of a crowd know when it was their time to pick up their listing.
Don Lancaster's books had a whole lot to do with the development of my career.
i was writing firmware for a well-known company. they were using a chip designed for matrix keyboard scanning that became unavailable. they even tried gray market sources and ended up with empty packages when they x-rayed them! i remembered from Lancaster's CMOS Cookbook an analog switch chip that was controlled like a 74138. Cheap and multiple manufacturers. I brought the book in and showed it to an engineer and they redesigned the boards to use that chip and it made my reputation at that company and I was in good.
You should replicate that keyboard, because there’s not that many regular ASCII keyboards on the market for people to use nowadays.
I did avidly read Don Lancaster's TV typewriter books, and used the information to create a TV display device for an early single board computer, which was the "junior computer", a clone of sorts of the KIM-1 single board 6502 based development board designed by the Dutch electronics magazine "elektuur" (now Elektor" ).
It used the idea of using the CPU (the 6502) to do most of the work, just like the Sinclair ZX-80.
Even though the PCB manufacturer produced my prototype PCB in mirror image, I forgot to tell them which side was the solder side and which side the component side, a rookies mistake :-) , I still managed to get it to work by folding over the legs of the various TTL DIP IC's over so the IC's were mounted "dead bug" style. and soldering the euro-connector interface to the junior computer on the back of the PCB. I had devised my own character-set inspired by the OHIO SCIENTIFIC's clone UK 101 character-set which included block graphics and card symbols. And it worked great notwithstanding the somewhat wavy nature of the screen (too much ripple on the power supply) and the fact that the junior could only "compute" during the blanking intervals. In the end my boss decided not to market my TV interface.
Dude, the algorithm is on your side. This showed up as a full yt ad below a tech tangents video I was watching. Definitely subscribing.
You are gonna blow up man
07:35 I loved that SWTPC keyboard.
The only keyboard I could find at the time with a square cutout!
Much easier than the stepped TAB, RETURN and SPACE bar !
p.s. I remember the joy of jumping from 110 to 300 bps. 1200 was heavenly.
9600 was a year or two later.
I recently just picked up the very first edition of that keyboard.. the one Don Lancaster designed for Popular Electronics in 1974. Pretty similar although fewer keys and a bit more delicate.
Don Lancaster, one of the legends, I remember from the early 80's. Forrest Mims. Jim Butterfield, Steve Wozniak... I knew Jim Butterfield (in Toronto; RIP) personally.
This is dedication to a replica on a level I have not seen in a long time. Mighty fine work, and a very in-depth exploration of what it took to create such a beautifully primitive and powerful device.
I’m so glad I came across your channel! I totally forgot about the Lancaster TVT I have in storage I built in the seventies and mounted on a masonite board to use with my IMSAI 8080 so I wouldn’t have to toggle in the binary. Thanks for a great job. I’m binging on the rest of your fare. Your voice and delivery remind me of another great channel, This Old Tony.
This is an awesome video (or should I say a full-length documentary) on the subject! Kind of reminds me of LGR Tech Tales but much more retro. As others have already said, I too feel that this is exactly the kind of information that's in a desperate need of an in-depth, hands-on attention these days. To honor and reminisce the dawn of the personal computing in a very enjoyable way. Thank you for taking the precious time and doing exactly that!
SUCH A NICE VIDEO! ONLY 77 VIEWS??!
Looked at Don Lancaster’s Wikipedia page and was sad to find out that he’s passed now. I love learning about these older electronics projects that came decades before I was born. I respect the efforts that went into making something affordable and moderately approachable.
Very cool. The production value of this video is crazy high for such a green channel, keep it up!
Very cool! I've been a fan of Don Lancaster since reading his articles in (I think) the early '90s, in Computer Shopper - tucked into those phonebook-sized issues among the ads for PC clones and assorted parts, the era's version of ebay, One article I recall vividly was on how to hack together a high-end Apple laser printer from a surplus board and a much cheaper printer.
I picked up a used copy of "TV Typewriter Cookbook" a few years back - I think a copy is downloadable from Don's site - and keep wanting to put a replica of one of the versions together, though I realize I could just bodge together an Arduino equivalent in an afternoon.
Thanks for going into such detail on this, it's a great watch.
Great video, notwithstanding the loud background music, I found it very interesting.
I had Don's book 'The Cheap Video Cookbook' back in the very late 70s with the intention of possibly building a video display for my F8 single board development kit.
However the video circuitry described in the book was really IIRC specifically for the KIM-1 and relied on a mysterious 'upstream tap' signal that basically did cycle-stealing from the processor, so that stymied my hopes of a more generic version.
Is the Feb 1973 R-E magazine article for building the keyboard available online anywhere? I looked but couldn't find it.
EDIT Never mind, I just found it on the deramp site!
I had no idea this existed, nice video.
I've been binging on your videos this evening, and they're all terrific. It's great to see a nice long, in-depth overview of this foundational equipment. I'm getting pretty tired of retro channels that are 80% washing and retrobrighting C64s!
This channel is a stroll down memory lane.... I miss my Apple //e. Love the history lessons.
This was a really cool video. I appreciate the time you took to add humor and go into detail. Look forward to seeing more!
The audience of the channel Technology Connections would probably enjoy this video, if you’re thinking of running another ad.
Actually, I AM part of Technology Connection's audience...and TechMoan's as well! I literally JUST discovered this channel now and have become an INSTANT fan and sub, so I would say your guess is quite correct! 😅😁👍
I wanted to build one for the longest time, but many of the of the components are pretty scarce, andnthe project is massive. The TVT6 is pretty amazing in that it consolidates the whole thing waaay down. I saw you have an unassembled kit for this, might you make a replacement board (as to not mess with your original kit) and try to build one in the future? It seems like it would be much simpler, and allow SBC builders to add on a terminal pretty cheap and easily.
Great video, and very nice work on your TVT!
I kind of got lucky building mine when I did. I'll talk about this more in a followup video but essentially I was aided in my quest for the rarer parts (the Signetics 8288s particularly) by a big liquidation sale on ebay. The shift registers are almost completely unavailable. I got lucky on those. But the thing I had the most trouble with was the crystal. I could not find a 4561.920khz crystal anywhere. It wouldn't have been a showstopper.. you can have one custom made, but I wanted the thing to look authentic. I ended up scoring a couple of 4520khz crystals off ebay and that seems to run the thing well enough.
The TVT6 PCB artwork is available in the original magazine article, which is posted on americanradiohistory.org (think that's the site..) as well as Lancaster's tinaja.com site. I'm reluctant to open the sealed package on mine but might if folks need a dump of the PROM to get it going.
@@TechTimeTraveller Yeah, I recall luck had as much to do with building one today as it did back then, as you mentioned in the video. The ROM should just be a character lookup table like the 2513, no? In which case no need to open your kit?
BTW, your channel is EXCELLENT. It encompasses my favorite era (and what I see as the critical transition period), the mid 70s until the very early 80s, when there were no rules because nobody even knew what a computer should be yet. Please keep at it, your content is very good!
The character generator for the 6 5/8 is a 2513 I think, yes. But there is also a PROM that contains the control program to interface it with a KIM-1. They also offered custom programming for other systems. Any capable programmer could probably create one themselves for whatever project they had in mind.
Many thanks for the kind words. The 70s are a favourite era of mine. The channel will sort of go wherever timeline-wise but a lot of it will focus on that era as it is so important.
@@TechTimeTraveller Ah yes...now that I look at the old build article, it seems there are code listings for writing to ROM or typing into the keypad on startup.
Pretty enlightening video. I was unaware of Don Lancaster and the TV Typewriter. In the fall of 1973, I was a freshman in high school and had a Television Production class. We used a Kapco Enterprises KG-1632 Character generator which basically had just a bit more functionality than the TV Typewriter. I still have this unit, but I have never found any further information on the company that produced it. Anyway, if I was using this unit in the fall of '73, there must have been other developers out there with TV Typewriters already?
There are a lot of things that Woz says in iWoz that have to be taken with a pinch of salt. He's a clever man, but no-one has a higher opinion of Woz than Woz himself.
I'm in my 40s, my dad bought an Apple ][+ when it came out because he was a ham radio guy and had tried and failed to build a computer. "You'd be surprised how hard it was." - Now that I hear the Don Lancaster name again, This is the group of projects he was discussing. And my dad was real good fixing tube radios and tv's. He understood the electrons and waves like some thing he could hold in his hand.
I'd love to see like say, audrino code that accomplishes what those 1973 chips and boards did with ascii and character advancement, etc.
Really cool channel!
Raise your hand if you remember the book (and even saw it for sale a/o borrowed it from a library)! *raises hand*
I really enjoyed this. I’m just old enough (62) to remember this era of computing where the first complex piece of home computing we owned was the Texas Instruments Sr-50 calculator which after an unfortunate incident in my high school engineering class was sent in for repair and was replaced by the even cooler SR-51. Also took a Fortran class in hs (FORTRAN 3) which introduced me to the teletype to connect with UIC’s mainframe system. My brother and I after college was the Commodore-64 color computer with tape drive and printer. The programmable sprites were a big innovation as was the modem connection to The local BBS communities.
So much advancement in such a short time!
Don Lancaster is a stone-cold hero of the micro computer age. I built a computer from a kit and then I found out I really needed a CRT terminal. But the prices of those things! Enter TV typewriter at a third or a fourth of the price of a modest commercial terminal. I didn't know anything about electronics, but it's Don to the rescue again with TTL Cookbook. Still one of my favorite technical writers. What a gifted man.
And he was so helpful! I'm asking him about a project he did 40+ years ago and he was still willing to email and troubleshoot with me. The saying 'don't meet your heroes' does *not* apply to Don Lancaster.
Wow, great video and a great portion of knowledge. You've got my sub, dear sir!
Great presentation. I built a version of the TVTW using point to point wiring rather than printed circuit boards. I started with Don's schematic, and partitioned the logic into the same 3 boards. However, I used flexible wire and connectors so I could get to all the components to measure voltages. Do used 512 bit shift registers for the memory, but I used 1024 bit shifters so I could have two pages. The "hidden" page was just shifted through during video refresh, and to switch pages, the hidden page bypass was just suppressed for one video frame.
Originally, I used an ASCI keyboard I bought from B&F Enterprises. I actually visited B&F in 1973. The place was outside of Boston. It was filled with all kinds of surplus electronic stuff. Later, after I built a home brew 8080 computer, I modified the TVTW and keyboard to interface them to the 8080. Lots of fun. I wrote a very compact "game of life" with the TVTW as the display and the keyboard as the input to set up the cells. I still have the stuff in my "museum" along with good photographic records. Thanks!
High quality information in here, very nice! Suggestion: leave the music out entirely. The looping piano piece in the background was really grating after a while.
We seem to have split opinion on that subject. I'm not sure I can satisfy everyone, I like to style my videos after full on documentaries and the music they use is quite pronounced. But what I've been trying to do is dial it way down and muffle it a bit during narration. And also avoid plinky piano pieces. I don't like having zero as I'm still not a fan of my own voice alone yet.
I remember seeing Lancaster's 'Cheap Video Cookbook' in the library in my childhood, at the time I had no EE education so it didn't really make sense, but it was still fascinating for some reason.
All that cryptic code! :)
9:28 "Don Championed its use with so-called surplus keyboards that had been recycled from devices like key-to-tape machines." Awesome detailed research! The cover of BYTE September 1975?
02:58 - "But while the average person might not have been salivating..." shown over a clip from a Salvo commercial. Salivating vs. Salvo. Well played, Sir.
I've always wanted to learn more about this! I've also never gotten an ad for a good video before, which is strange.
Holy moly this professional production quality is worthy of being on tv itself.
Thank you. Much appreciated.
Paused @ 16:00. First, an excellent presentation so far. It must be difficult to articulate in this generation of trivial tech - what we used to consider so gee-whiz amazing in the day. I remember paying $20 (when I made three per hour and that was good money) for a surplus keyboard .. and there was a shop which had pallets of boards at (if I recall $0.50 a board) as-is .. and we would take them home and desolder ICs.
Don't laugh .. but I still have some of my vintage 70's date coded 7490's .. which at the time were like seeing actual boobies that weren't in the Sears Catalog bra section. Lol.
I followed everything Lancaster wrote right into the mid 90's, and actually spoke with him once .. long before the internet, there was the resource library (I think we still could smoke in it) but no solution found. He talked me over the phone (when long-distance charges hurt) through a digital timing problem.
Here in '22 .. I can't figure out microsoft team and get freaked out when my phone wants to update. I'm a dinosaur. But still an odd part of history .. "My time" nearly a generation after Charlie and Janis .. but as far removed currently as they were to me when I was poking 6502 assembly.
Can't wait to see more of your kit .. You win a subscribe. Old vets jawing about a war .. In this case silicon - o'er glasses of beer the old buggers would salt.
Bro. What the fuck? This channel is fucking incredible. How have I only just now been suggested this channel by the RUclips algorithm? Solid channel and content. Crazy how much these dudes did to make computers so accessible and all I use my computer for is watching videos of Age of Empires 2 competitions and hardcore pornography.
This was great! Looking forward to the build video!
This is fascinating to learn about so thank you!
Hey I have a question?
I have a Commodore 64 you could fix. It was my first major computer I’ve ever gotten my collection I got it when I was nine.
I have been reading Don's stuff for many years. His case against patents helped me put the brakes on when an invention company was trying to get their hooks in me. 20 years later I saw where they were ousted as scammers. Much Thanks to Don Lancaster!
Hey TimeTraveller, awesome vid. I found it thoroughly interesting, and funny. Sort of got me interested in vintage electronics.
Hey thanks for taking the time to answer my comment! The song seems like it'll be really fun to play.
I appreciate your videos and the level of detail you put into them. Thanks again.
I remember reading about that several years back. Just tells me the world was ready for home computers.
In 1973 there was still Poly Paks surplus! You could buy a lot of good stuff surplus.
Really great video!! I love how informative and entertaining your channel is. Keep it up!
I‘ve got this video as an commercial in the video suggestions and I‘m just so glad I clicked on it! It‘s just so informative, interesting and the 45 minutes just felt like 10. Great work, please keep going with it and I hope that you‘re getting more views soon, you totally deserve it! :)
I saw the 1973 edition when I was in jr. high school, and was inspired by the electronics allowing creation of the "TV Typewriter, but not so inspired by its lack of utility, since I had already seen the (giant) "word processors" that were coming of age. The Altair 8080 was far more interesting, but not much more useful.
I built one in 1973. Never had it working 100%.
Mike, I don't know for sure, but this seems like the project my father described trying to build "out of a magazine". before I was born. I was born on Apple day 4/11/76. When Apple ][+ came out, we got one, and he was so amazed by how it worked. This gives me an Idea of what was going on. Knowing him, he probably tried to build a keyboard.
Great video and thank you giving a little bit of pre history to the TV Typewriter and giving credit to those who came before Apple. The two Steve's definitely deserve to be remembered for everything they did in building "Apple", but they always took more credit than they deserved.
do you know where the charset ROM comes from? Was it designed originally or copied/inspired by an existing system? I'm curious because it's the same charset used later in Apple II (and others).
I don't think the 2513 was designed for a specific system. I could be wrong on that. But that's an interesting question.. I might dig into that a little bit.
@@TechTimeTraveller ok, I didn't know it had a 2513 by Signetics, I thought it had a custom made ROM. Yes, I also guess the 2513 was just a generic chip, I'm curious to know what other system adopted it (Apple I for sure).
@@ninoporcino5790 I seem to recall some computer design or another substituting a regular old ROM for the 2513 - that its function was more of a lookup table than a special IC.
That it is just a ROM is my understanding; it's also the reason you need the -5v and -12v power. There were later chips that worked the same with just +5v; the General Instruments RO-3-2513 is one of those, if you can find _that_.
I suspect that you could burn a small eprom in a pattern that would replicate the functionality - but of course the pinout would probably differ, and it'd be a much more involved redesign.
"Random BACKslashes"? The only slashes I saw there were the forward ones.
Wow, this is a great milestone in hobby computer history. I vaguely remembered it but now I feel like an expert. Great video!
This was one of the first projects I built as a kid. I read about it in Radio-Electronics. I was in high school and needed a terminal for my 8080 kit. It was a lot of fun to build and use.
Cool story! Do you know if it’s still around?
You'll never convince me that Woz didn't know who Don effing Lancaster was! No way had he never heard of the TV Typewriter. Hell, I myself still have my copy of that book to this day! Woz is a brilliant man, but that's just BS!
Also, I was about to complain about you using that Ragtime music for the 1970s - Ragtime is from the 1900s! - but then I remembered that The Sting came out in 1973, and we were suddenly hearing tons of Ragtime on our radios. Now, I do wonder how YOU remembered that.... lol
My musical tastes are a bit eclectic. Plus RUclips's audio library mostly consists of modern techno stuff that totally does not fit a video about the TVT. I also have trouble believing Woz didn't know of Lancaster. He's made some eyebrow raising claims.. such as that he hadn't heard of a microprocessor until 1975. But yeah. He did claim to be unaware of the TVT in a couple of sources I read. I really feel the Apple 1's terminal apes it pretty closely.
I've never been good at programming, but reading the jargon file made me feel like I understood something about the early days of computing and this video reminds me of that anthropological thrill of seeing people do something amazing you barely understand.
As part of my reasearch into video cards of 1970's and 1980's magazine projects, I saw many designs that showed clear links back to Don Lancasters designs, even those new designs based on the early CRTC chips had design points that echoed decisions Don had made. In some of these the only real major design difference was that they put the cursor control under control of the host microcomputer, bur many of them still maintained a separate memory space nor accessible by said microcomputer, including the Apple 1 display, which used shift registers, which makes me suspicious that Woz was rather more aware of Don's design that he was implying.
Yeah I used to take Woz's word for everything but I'm a bit more skeptical on this one. There are some clear differences in his terminal design but they are remarkably close. It could just be great minds thinking alike.. but Don created some waves with thr TVT and I find it very hard to believe Woz didn't hear of it either directly or the Homebrew Computer Club etc. Seems questionable.
Wow you video production is absolutely excellent! I can see myself spending way too much time on this channel.
A friend and I both built the TV typewriter in our junior year of High school. Took a while to debug due to bad chips. But we both got them working. Built a Altair 8800 the next year and interfaced it with a serial link to the TV typewriter.
That’s fricking awesome
all right, born in 75? Really cool seeing someone closer to my age talking about vintage electronics from a "been there" perspective. I was born in 1980, and that seems like a big world of difference, but in America home computing was slow going. Compared to across the ocean where they were doing home computing for almost every household in the UK the US was way behind. I was so very VERY interested in computers ever since I was just a little girl, but the only computer I got to use regularly in the early 80s was my 1st brother's grandparent's computer, the Commodore 64. I'd have to wait until 1st grade to play with Apple II computers at school. And still, we had no home computer because my parents foolishly thought all I'd do with it was play video games. By the time I got grand dad's old computer it was 1993 and the machine was on its way out for bigger, grander machines. I did care though, I finally had something I could learn on, and I used it nearly every single day. I did have to re-learn how to type though, since computers in the 80s still used the old typewriter positions of certain symbols and the modern keyboard layout that we know today was not standard.
Sorry I went off on such a tangent. I just want to say that this 40 year old lady is now subscribed to your channel and I hope to see many many more videos from you.
Many thanks for the vote of confidence! Hard to believe we are all up in our 40s now. Life goes so fast.
I'm glad you're enjoying these. I'm enjoying exploring an area of tech that doesn't get a ton of attention. There were so many interesting things going on in the mid to late 70s that I missed. We got our first computer (a Vic 20) around 1980 or 81.. so this whole world that was going on before didn't exist to me until I discovered ebay.
The next video, which I am finishing up, is about the Digital Group.. very interesting company that went out of business in 1979. Hope to get it out soon and thanks again for the sub!
Don't know if you're interested, but I think a huge factor in UK home computing is that the Spectrums and similar machines used cassette tapes for storage. Cheap, easy to trade, easy for ambitious amateurs to sell. In the US, and specifically for games, we went from cartridges to floppy disks with copy protection. Floppies were relatively expensive. None of my teenage friends thought their little attempts at programming, games or otherwise, could ever be sold or even just distributed. It was very different for my friends in the UK.
I actually built a device to add an image to the upper right of the TVTW screen as a computer science project. I had a blast designing and adding this gizmo to the SWTP kit!
Cool
i like your style and the history is pretty cool, but the song in the background just sucks, the video will be 100+ better if no music was added
Yes that was my second documentary style video ever and I was just learning how to control volume. I really wish RUclips still had the option to replace or update a video. I don't want to take it down because it has been picked up.. chalk it up to learning.
Excellent! Really interesting :)
God, the awful, incessant background music! Shoot me now!
Thanks for the video!!!
I heard the first time about the TV Typewriter when our professor have introduced it in an FPGA project. Although I have never seen one in person but seems like a great achievement for the 60s era.
Please do make a video on an 8-bit computer [Olivier Bailleux's “Gray-1” a processor]
Its impressive stuff
Cheers!!
"Now... I was born in 1975, which means I didn't even exist yet when..."
Actually, you did. Not being born yet and not existing are different things. Just like you'll continue to exist when you die, and so on.
Some assembly required by his parents...?
@@mikecowen6507: Haha! Sort of, but not really, in the sense of already being who he is. More to it than that.
The late 60s and early 70s were the golden age of electronics as the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors and ICs was all but complete. Then came the analog to digital era. I built one complex project from Radio Electronics magazine. That was the vidicon TV camera by Gary Davis. I had the pleasure to meet Gary 40 years after the fact and discuss it with him. There was, as mentioned in this video, a serious schematic error I was never aware of. The horizontal sync coming out of the camera was 40 volts pk-pk! I was able to get the picture on a vacuum tube Setchell Carlson TV I owned by direct video input. So, the project was a success. Gary asked me if I'd seen the correction in the following issue of the magazine. I had not. All I could say to him was, "DOH!". It was still a cool project. It was my second TV camera and I was only 14 when I built it.
You deserve way more subscribers.
Just rediscovered this channel... great content... great production. Was in High School in the '70s... avid reader of Popular Electronics, Radio Electronics, etc... remember Don Lancaster's stuff well. Fun and interesting time for electronics technology. Advances were fast and furious... and very accessible to the hobbyist. Led to degrees in engineering followed by a 40+ year career in tech... now blissfully retired. Cut my teeth on Altairs, PDP8s, PDP11s and Data General Novas... as well as single board 8080s, 6502s and Z80s... stone knives and bearskins compared to anything out there today... as I watch this on my android tablet which has thousands of times more power than anything from back in those days...
14:51 Could you please elaborate on the SwTPc connection here, since we see that on the etched board layout templates you show? Wow! You touch on the answer at 15:03, but I'd love to hear more in a future video about the roots of that relationship... AH, but you again talk about this relationship at 41:23, very nice!
Hmmmm... my DEC VT05 came out in 1970 and was one of the first commercial successes of a device that you could "type a character on a keyboard and see it show up on the screen right in front of them"... :)
Thank you for providing this trip down memory lane. I received one of the original set of stackable boards from a friend and got it working and installed it in a wood cabinet. It wasn’t particle but I did learn a lot getting it to work on my Explorer S100 kit. It was a slight improvement over my noisy mechanical baudot terminal. The 70s was a great time for tinkerers.
My favorite project adjacent to the TV typewriter, is a program for the arduino uno that will take a serial input and type to a tv.
Thank you so much for this video! I was born in 1978 and at some point (evidently between 1973 and 1978) my father (an electrical engineer in the 60's-mid 80's) built one of these that sat up high on a filing cabinet. I was rarely allowed to touch it, but I would sneak typing sessions here and there just to play around. He had built it encased in thick Plexiglas, and I vaguely remember seeing stacked boards like you mention. I always knew it was impressive but I hadn't realized just how difficult a lot of the parts had to be to obtain. Like you say, we are so spoiled now with being able to grab electronic components on a whim cheaply and easily. Even if he had access to stuff through work (which I doubt) it had to be a challenge to get and build everything. SUBSCRIBED!
Many thanks for the sub and very glad you enjoyed the video! Do you know what became of your father's machine? Even finding pictures of original TVTs is tricky business!
Sadly I'm pretty sure it was tossed out when we moved from Chicago to Las Vegas in 1993. He had so many 70s era electronics projects that were lost to time, unfortunately.
@@sethbramwell This is so frustrating. At some point I walk up to my old man and I ask him 'So... remember that weird computer you had laying around 30 years ago in the shelf that we threw out? Do you remember what it was?' And he be like, 'Oh, that - I built that one from an article in some German computer magazine'. And now I absolutely hate the fact that I had some 3 or 4 old computer projects laying around the house and they got thrown out in the 90s because we never would've guessed those machines would spike interest in people some 30 years later (especially since some chips are becoming more and more unobtainable). So many regrets.
0:08 The date in iWOZ is not correct. According to iWOZ, WESCON where MOS microprocessors were sold took place in June. In fact it was in September. Steve Wozniak later told CNET "I had gone back to old old materials to figure out that June 29 date but it was actually quite wrong. The incident was reported correctly by me but it occurred some time later in the year." When Wozniak traveled to Wescon to buy MOS CPU, Sphere was already presenting there a prototype of its Motorola 6800 based microcomputer with video RAM.
There's a high-pitch noise in the background starting at around 31:30, it's actually quite loud and even somewhat painful.
It seems to be in the frequency range of 'The Mosquito' (~16Khz), which is a teenage loitering repellent as it can only be heard by 'young ears'.
It's a bit off/on through the video from there, at 37:00 it's also quite loud.
I'm afraid this is a "boomer" poll, now, but:
Everybody!!!!: WHAT, was your FIRST interaction with an actual COMPUTER? How old were you?
Me: I was 12, circa 1974, 7th grade, and I had won my school's science fair and was at the local university campus, showing in the regionals (yeah, my project didn't rate a second-glance THERE, but never mind,) So, part of the day, was a tour of the school, and... down one hallway, they had a TELETYPE set up, running a BLACKJACK game!!! I didn't know what i was doing, but when mom finally pulled me away, I had about $3500 in fake buck winnings! Wheeee!!!! I was hooked. The rest, as they say, was hysteria.
In the 70s my favorite Don Lancaster publication is the CMOS COOKBOOK first published in 1977. The edition I have is a first edition seventh printing 1982 paperback, published by Howard W. Sams & Company. The book focused on the CMOS 4000 B-Series, very easy to use and very low power. I remember being challenged at work in a contest with other EEs to build the lowest power periodic blinky LED light for a vehicle monitor. Much like you see in cars today, that blinky light on the dash board at the base of the windshield. The final design ran for over 5 years on a 9V battery. I don't really know how long it lasted after the 5 years because I changed jobs. From the 4000 B series offerings the 4046 Phase Locked Loop is probably the most interesting IC I used. PLLs are really fascinating to me. The 4060 14 stage binary ripple counter with internal oscillator was also a lot of fun.
Wow I was 15 yrs old when the TV Typewriter came out, I wanted one but my parents wouldn't let me get one. they said it was too expensive. LOL They weren't electronics geeks like me. I loved everything solid state to the point I would be fixing my old broken AM transistor radios myself. I knew the Home Computer was going to be big. the first one I bought myself was a CoCo 1. I was twenty at the time and used my own money to buy it, it cost almost $400. that was quite a bit back then the average annual salary was around $12,000 a year.
In 1986 I bought a second hand keyboard on school for $100 for which I had to add some logic so I could write my own keyboard scanner on my vic-20 as the keyboard on my vic-20 was worn.
Later I could buy a second hand/scrap tektronix keyboard which did serial ttl, for which I had to write my own serial I/O. It was probably a defect in the keyboard, because it was clocked at around 7kb/s .
Eventually 10 years later I could buy an affordable PC keyboard, and I used that for my vic-20.
I used a shift register for that.
But yeah, that keyboard is fucking important.
q: as legend has it, what, was the content of the very-first email sent?
Was it, "What hath God wrought?"
Maybe, "Watson come here, I need you?"
a: Nope. it was..... "QWERTY"
YOU DON'T ACTUALLY NEED ANY OF THE CHARACTERS THE SIGNETICS 2513 CAN'T DISPLAY.
Wonderful topic but annoying background music. Loose the music.
Hello from the UK.
I still have my CMOS Cookbook by Don Lancaster and remember the TVT and BitBoffer in the contents.
Here in the UK, disk drives, monitors and even the computer was _really_ expensive. The dollar-pound might have been 2:1, about the same as earnings, but its purchasing power was 1:1 so £200 was a lot for a C64. I loved coding and rarely bothered playing games so my GF's dad took an old but crisp B&W TV and wired up a monochrome monitor via the video out socket.
I do like the 2 bit alignment of the screen, though. Learning assembler and having to divide by 40 instead of 32 or 64 to get the line was a pain in the neck, especially when the 6502 doesn't have a divide instruction. Hell, I think the kernel actually had a lookup table for column-row calculations. I think I hard-coded the multiplication with shifts and adding 32 and 8.
I'm no electrical engineer but couldn't the backspace key have been added and wired as a reverse-switch/space combo? The same with adding cursor keys that connected both the keep and space signals, or was that just a case backspace and cursor control being a concept that hadn't arrived yet?