Mar 6
Memory subsystem from a DEC Alpha workstation designed by yours truly back in 1991. Another Digital alum buddy and I are trying to resurrect this beast.
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Memory subsystem from a DEC Alpha workstation designed by yours truly back in 1991. Another Digital alum buddy and I are trying to resurrect this beast.
Back in the mid 70s we bought our first video game console, I believe it was this APV Fun console or variant but it's a bit fuzzy 50 years later.
It played pong. And "Hockey" which tbh was pong with a goal. It's hard to imagine now how this could have been such a compelling, magical experience but then it definitely was.
I'm amazed it was fun looking back, and I was there. But you kind of have to remember that it came out into a world where there were no home computers or DVDs or VHS or even cable TV.
You had a couple channels on TV and that's it. There was no form of interactive home entertainment, whatsoever. The idea that you could control something on a TV and play a game on it was mind-blowing.
The magic of this console didn't last long of course. Pretty soon the video game dominated the arcade and the home video console market exploded too.
But I definitely remember this little time when pong was king and we suddenly realized your TV could be something more than a passive device.
Repost but just a reminder, y'all: I owned 1982. (Years since, less so. Lol.)
Shout out to Spirograph, the super high resolution configurable graphic image generator of my childhood.
Paper tape reader on a model 35 teletype, circa 1963.
Still have some paper tape programs, I learned to program in the late 70s but our high school had (typically) outdated equipment, and was still rocking a few of these connected to our PDP-8.
We are getting closer to finding out why our 1994 DEC 3000 AXP workstation will not fire up.. narrowed down to a short on the 12V supply, and that in turn led to this highly suspicious capacitor.
Coming out like a rotten tooth on Tuesday, stay tuned.
Recent addition to my collection of pre-LCD handheld games, Tomy Tennis from 1982.
I've talked about it before but I have a love of electronic games produced in this narrow window of time after integrated circuit chips got cheap but before there were any good options for displaying graphics besides TV.
This would be late 70s to early 80s, and there was a lot of creativity to make portable games that actually gave you understandable output. LEDs were often used or in this case, vacuum florescent displays (VFDs) that allowed arbitrary shapes to be illuminated with that characteristic blue-green glow.
By the time you get to the mid 80s cheap monochrome LCDs were in production and these games vanished. You can understand why, this game requires four C batteries to feed the power hungry VFD, and probably would drain them in an hour or less.
More work towards getting this 1993 DEC 3000 AXP "Flamingo" workstation to live again. We took not one but two bad electrolytic caps off the I/O board, and the system powers up now and even produces video
We got as far as memory configuration in the boot sequence before it stopped. The Alpha CPU is running though and it does drive video even. More to do though it seems.. will update when and if we get further. We got not one but two old guys doing stuff on this project lol.