Thank you to everyone who took a chance, clicked on my Ad and came to watch this video. I created this channel after the inadvertent demise of my original channel, BradH. BradH was one of those 'channels' that just got autocreated because I wanted to comment on something, or share videos of the kids with my Mom, etc. I also shared videos of my vintage computers there, basically home videos... no editing. I'd always wanted to create more 'formal' videos - videos with decentish lighting, maybe a few special effects. Particularly documentaries as I've been in love with those my whole life. My first attempt at this was the Digital Group Z80 video - shot with a handy cam and minimally edited. Several years later, I decided to really go for it and did my first 'documentary-style' video featuring the OSI 300 trainer board. That video earned the notice of hackaday and did pretty well, which was really exciting as a new 'creator'. I followed up with this Unbuilt Kits video and so on. Eventually I decided I wanted to separate the 'formal' videos from the home videos, choose a more descriptive channel name and such, so I set up a branding account. Unfortunately in the process, I managed to delete the original channel, which was unrecoverable. So I set this one up, hastily reuploaded (which is why many videos are within weeks of each other) and took the huge penalty in exposure that comes with starting all over again. Since then I've created some small 'tour' videos (8BitBites) and have been working on a bunch of projects soon to come. Anyway, I sincerely appreciate everyone who took a risk and clicked on that Ad, not knowing if they were going to be sucker punched into buying something, or Rickrolled, or worse. But that was never the intent - this channel is produced for the joy of it. There is no Patreon, no tshirts to sell, none of that for the forseeable future. It's like Biff said in Back to the Future II, relating what his future self told him about the Sports Almanac: "No catch." I've so enjoyed the learning process - probably my favorite thing was messing around with the green screen - and the joy of seeing it all come to life onscreen. I decided to go the Ad route for two reasons - one was to put some skin in the game and push myself to keep going, and the other was to try and recover from the loss of the old channel. TH-cam is a hard place for small, 'new' channels to get noticed. It is deeply moving to have even one person compliment your work, let alone a whole bunch, let alone, as of this writing, 171 people who actually took the time and the extra step to click Subscribe. Thank you so much for the kind words and those votes of confidence. It means the world to me and motivates me to keep doing, keep learning, and hopefully, keep entertaining. Thank you, thank you, thank you - BradH.
I saw the ad and decided to put it in watch later, since this sort of video would normally be something I'd click on immediately - but the ad part definitely put me off. Glad I took that chance though, it was quite an entertaining video - subscribed and best of luck with the channel!
Hi. I am the David Griffiths who designed the DG680. Thanks for the nice review. In answer to your question about the numbering, the VDU was first described in Electronics Today magazine and they assigned it project number 640. When I wrote the article about the CPU they called it 680. I am not sure whether that was the next number in their sequence or whether they jumped to 680 in a nod to the Z80. Applied Technology, the company that sold the kits, tended to brand it as DG-Z80. I don't remember what the selling price was but I think you are in the right ball park. You are right about the DG initials but I later formed a company called Digital Graphics Pty Ltd - what an amazing co-incidence about the initials ;-)
Thank you for this note! It is always an honor to 'meet' the people who designed and made this stuff work. I wondered about those model numbers! I keep hoping to stumble on a DG640. Do you know how well the kits sold?
@@TechTimeTraveller I think there would have been roughly the same number of DG640 or slightly more. Some people used the DG640 with different processors. I don't know the actual numbers but in the low thousands - small beans compared to the US market. I might have been rich now if I'd live somewhere else :-)
@@diggraph Thanks David for designing those boards, they came along at a time I was a high school student, and I learned a lot. My only wish was that the PCG was a full bit-mapped screen instead of a character rom set replacement. I spent a long time trying to devise a Least-Used system for recycling PCG chars, never got it to work properly. DGOS was a great little monitor!
First time I've gotten an ad on this site that actually looked interesting. I've been looking for more channels focused on vintage computing, but beyond the few big ones, had no clue where to find them. Subscribed 😊
I have a Commodore MOS KIM-1 myself. This presentation is awesome as this hardware predates commercial production of personal computers and geared towards industrial, scientific/academic and hobbyists.
@@seamusquain2706 I don't think it'd be possible to buy one new nowadays, but I've seen them go up for sale on eBay. Keep in mind they all run on 220v so you would need a transformer, and afaik they all run basic (in English too)
@@seamusquain2706 There is someone on Ebay selling a Russian sinclair clone kit, but your chances of it working on many types of video display areslim, and software compatibility with real ZXs is poor.
When I was in college in NYC back in the 70's, I was a member of a computer club in Long Island. There were at least 3 people in the club who had built Mark-8's, and there were one or two under construction. At every meeting we would have people bringing in their machines and demonstrating them work. The MARK-8s sometimes played music either via a speaker hooked up to an output port, or by making noise on a transistor radio. I remember that two of those Mark 8's were expanded machines, housed in large cabinets (internal separate power supplies). I don't know if those were kits or home made PCBs. In an attempt to build a PIC-A-STAR amateur radio transceiver using DSP, I actually have made some of my own double sided boards using toner transfer. It's a bear to do. I first put the resist on one side and spray paint the other side to protect from the etchant. I then etch the board, I used a mix of 2 parts H2O2, with 1 part of Muriatacid (Diluted HCL, sold to adjust swimming pool PH). After the first side is etched, I removed the paint and the resist with mineral spirits. Now I drill a few key holes to help me align the second side toner transfer. The PCB design artwork has a few "bullet points" on it for this purpose. With the second side resist ironed on, I spray paint the etched side and throw the board in the etchant again. Again remove paint and resist, clean, dry. The PCBs I made were for high density SMT parts, through hole 'jellybean" parts, and the usual gang of connectors. The 100 mill through hole parts spacing actually ended up aligning close enough for the dual side layout not to short circuit, or not circuit. I used "Augat" sockets which stand proud of the board by about 1mm, you can solder these on both sides of the board. So homemade double sided boards are not impossible, but these day you will just use Kicad to design them, and send off to China to get them made.
4:44 My brother and I built a number of Applied Tech's S100 boards (actually 'S-100' back then) and also the black cardframe. It was a good system and the DGOS ("dee-goss") monitor with hex editor on 2716 was pretty easy to use and could save to tape. It was all fine until one Saturday we went to Applied Tech's shop in a northern suburb of Sydney only to find not a trace of their S100 machines anymore. They had all gone and been replaced by the Microbee. The CEO of AT told us it was backwards compatible with the S100 system and that Microbee software would run on our machine. Well of course it wasn't that simple. The Microbee had a different keyboard setup which IIRC used the light pen input on the 6845 and any Microbee software needed patching to use the DGOS calls. I did do it for a few programs. Needless to say we were very annoyed about it all, after having spent a lot of money on building the computer. I modified the DG680 with a rocker switch on the top edge of the board to switch a 4MHx crystal, and replaced the CPU with a Z80A and it ran really well. Sometimes I could even switch from 2 to 4 MHz and it would continue to run but more often it needed a reset. I think the DG640 VDU was based on the SOL-20 video circuitry, certainly AT sold games such as Missile Defence that displayed 'Processor Technology' on the start screen. As the supplied MicroWorld BASIC was not very good, I ported TRS-80 LII BASIC to the machine by typing in the 12K of hex digits from the BASIC Decoded book over a few weeks, patched the keyboard and (I think) video start location. I made a replica TRS80 graphics character set for the PCG card and got MS Flight Simulator to run, made a 4 voice music synth speaker for it (from a BYTE article), also started writing a DOS for a Versafloppy II based on another BYTE article. I still have some of these bits of software, the rest went with the machine a long time ago.
I absolutely adore your skits, sir~! It gets so old watching all these kids on yt using the same stock footage over and over while doing monologues.. Your Style is Remarkably Refreshing and You put out such Fun content!!! I'm learning so much! Thank You!
Many thanks! The skits came about because I couldn't find images to fill narration time and I didn't want to spend on stock footage. I thought they would be fun to do, kind of an homage to silent film (except my Dr. Claw impression) and give the channel kind of a homey feel. Really glad people are enjoying them instead of being like 'omg what a loser hahahahaha' :)
Aussie Lad here. Yeah, Al-foil on polystyrene was the standard for me growing up. There was some chips stored on good antistatic foam, but most of the time it just crumbled into a gross dust. Im not sure if it was the climate or they just sent the junk out to the colonies. I’ve found huge panels of chips done this way when digging through storage at work, obviously not original packaging, but re-packed for storage (in the 80’s, I found this in about 2015). But dad had a few boxes of parts from when he worked as a photocopier tech, hes more of a mechanic, but I found enough opamps and 74xx chips to get into mischief. Electronics Australia has a long and colourful history, but I can blame/thank them for a lot, I got my first copy in ‘95. I could wax lyrical, but to keep on topic, they also got me into the hardware of computing. They had a series of articles, The $100 PC, which pointed out if you didnt need the top of the line $3000 Pentium, a very capable machine could be built from parts for bugger all. A bit of scrounging, troubleshooting, fleamarkets n hand-me-downs. This is pre-internet, so a bunch of articles telling you what to look for and the obvious Gotchya’s was priceless. As a pre-teen, that became my mission. Christmas and birthday money, dumpster diving at my Dad and Uncles work, picking the brain of the local computer shop, I had **MY** pc. There was the family computer, but I was forbidden to take the lid of that. So I built my own. My mates had a Nintendo or a Sega. I had a Computer. I now collect old electronics magazines, and had I been born a generation before, I 100% would have built myself a S100 system. Im half tempted to now, just for shits and giggles.
Yeah that special static foam I think always goes nasty.. you probably saw that in the video at various points. I think it needs very specific climate conditions and even then it degrades. EA is a great magazine.. I have been poring over articles as something I'm hoping to do with the channel is revive old electronics projects from magazines like that. I can't remember if EA published the Educ8 ? But stuff like that is really interesting to me.
Haha! Thank you! I've done a few of those.. one is about halfway into my Computerland video and I think the other is in one of my Unfridging videos. Those two feature an actual 'appearance'.
Great video :) I still have some Don Lancaster books, specifically TTL cookbook and CMOS cookbook. He describes the TV typewriter in the ttl cookbook. Used these books in the 80s and 90s before datasets were easily available via the Internet. I feel old now.
Giving the originals to the museum is a good gesture. But before that, make as many good copies of it as possible, so that others can learn from it. That is what the makers would have wanted. Maybe take out a few little mistakes, improve it a bit here and there, nothing wrong with that. Having to think in a structured manner is good for kids. Building something from scratch is good too. Neither is there something wrong with making a few buck by selling replicas. Information is free, it has to be spread to have effect. Carry on, you do good work.
My dad built a Heath H88/89 back when I was in elementary school (around '79). He still has it and says it should still run if he replaced the power supply in it. I can remember learning BASIC on it and my dad upgrading it from a H88 w/16k to a H89 with 2 floppy drives. Even though the second drive isn't around anymore, I'd love to get ahold of some hard sector floppies and the OS for that beast and see if I could relive some of my childhood days on it.
I have an H88 here... I'd love to get my hands on the original H9 terminal they had for it. Pretty cool machine. When you use the front panel it feels like you're programming the time machine from Back to the Future.
I had a friend (sadly now dead) who used to build the old kit computers that used switches and a momentary button to enter data into the computer and the output was via lights.
Or creepy.. a while back I was in a Walmart and remarked to my wife about the presence of the C64 Mini on a shelf. Didn't pick it up or look it up on my phone, just mentioned it in passing, yet not 30 seconds later I had a Facebook ad offering it at another store for 20% less!
Back in the day, WAY back (1978-1980), I worked for a process control company. One of my contracts was Fortin Laminating that manufactured bare circuit board. Makes me wonder if any of their products ended up in these kits.
I got the Central Data 2650 back in the day and built it. I didn't have a parallel ASCII keyboard so used an AIM65 to provide that function. The CD2650 still works. I am thinking of expanding it and putting it into a nice perspex case. I have a spare C64 keyboard which I will use instead of having to get out the AIM65.
Very cool! If you decide to take some pictures or video please let me know. Would love to see one assembled! Apparently there was an expansion kit of some kind? I saw a pic of it on old-computers.com I think. Looked like S100 or something similar.
@@TechTimeTraveller : As someone who cut my home-computer teeth on my Central Data 2650, I can confirm that the expansion you're thinking of is Central Data's S-100 expansion board. I used mine to expand the RAM and add Central Data's floppy-controller board. (Every few years I search to see what's out there on the CD 2650, and wow I found a lot this time, including your video! I know I'll be restoring mine at some point, so I keep gathering as much info as I can toward that day. And I'm happy to answer any CD 2650 questions that my aging memory will let me - it was my only computer for a few years in the late 70s so I knew it extremely well.)
@@gordonbrandly4352 Many thanks for the reply! I actually very recently got my hands on a built CD2650 and the S100 expansion board. They look to be in pretty close to pristine condition, but are missing the interconnect cables that link them. I went through the old Radio Electronics articles and sort of followed it month to month hoping to find where they introduced the S100 expansion board, but alas.. no sign of that. I suppose it could have come out months after the original article, or maybe not even been an article at all. Any info you have would be deeply appreciated for sure!
@@TechTimeTraveller : Excellent! And yes as you suspected, that S-100 board came out a couple of years after the original magazine article. I have all that stuff squirrelled away in my garage, and I'm hoping I still have the manuals as well. You've given me more incentive to look for it now, though work is busy and it might still be a while before I can get to it. But I'll make a note to look as soon as I can and contact you if I find any of that. I could always haul my main board assembly into the house and take pictures of how those two boards are connected, at least. I'll need to take those pictures sooner or later anyway. :)
What a fascinating collection! I started building (mostly) retro kit computers last year, and I just finished a slightly-updated reproduction of the "78up5" Signetics 2650 Mini System (also published in Electronics Australia as an update to the slightly older one you showed, I believe) a couple days ago. Having proved that it works as advertised (I can enter machine code into the PIPBUG system monitor via serial terminal, then execute that code and see the output), I'm please with the result but not sure what else to do with it now, hehe. Documentation I've found suggests that, at one time, there was commercial software available for it, as well as upgrade projects, but I haven't found the binaries for any of the software yet, and the old magazine articles that describe projects are not in the greatest, most readable state. Oh, well. It was fun, just the same, and there's always the future! Other kits I've built use the RCA COSMAC 1802, Zilog Z80 and Z180, Intel 8080A and 8085, MOS 65C02, and Rockwell 6501Q. I even just today looked at websites offering kits of boards to build your own reproduction Schelbi-8H or 8B and Mark 8, but the prices, just for the boards, are a little eye watering, so I think I'll have to skip those. :-O Thank you so much for showing us your fine collection of original, vintage kits! :-)
A lot of the hardcore OG computer people were electronics engineers and techs, these half built things are from people who fancied having a go but for whatever reason gave up.
I've etched and drilled my own double sided boards from artwork using the toner transfer method. The technique is to transfer toner pattern to one side of the board (with a clothes iron), and then spray paint the other side to protect the copper during etching. Etch the board, then drill a few key holes that are the alignment markers with the other side. Remove the spray paint from the reverse side, and then transfer the toner to the now blank side. Use push pins in the alignment holes to insure that the second side pattern lines up, then iron on the reverse side pattern. I usually do the most complex side first. Spray paint the etched side, and then etch the second side. Then remove the paint and resist from both sides. Drill out the board. Hopefully, if the artwork was good, and your alignment close, the holes will all line up. I usually didn't get 100% perfect alignment, but it was close enough to be able to connect both sides without shorts. Double sided board artwork designed for home etching will usually have lots of wire via holes. In some places soldering a part on both sides performs this function. Augat sockets that mount about 1-2 mm proud of the board can be soldered on both sides. I am building a DSP ham transceiver called the Pic-a-Star, and have etched some double sided boards that use SMT parts. The most complex part was the DSP processor board, DSP codec board, and mother board. All double sided (though 80% of the tracking was contained on one side). The DSP module works. :-) Gluing two boards together is an interesting approach, but you CAN home etch a double sided board. I have mixed feelings about not building those kits. I see MANY classic unbuilt Heathkits on ebay. In many cases the collectors won't even OPEN the box as they feel that devalues the kit. (But then how do you know that you didn't just buy a box full of rocks?) Sadly, even if you wanted to build some of those kits you'd first have to buy new capacitors as the ones supplied with the kit have probably all dried up and are now useless. You should quickly remove all those IC's from the old black foam, I recently discovered some parts I'd had in storage for some 40 years with the IC pins completely rotted away! I was able to salvage some by soldering them into Augat sockets. BTW, there is a basic language for the 8008 that was published in book form. (The code is supplied in both 8008 and 8080 versions). I started out in computers by getting a 6502 processor at MosTechnology's booth during the 1976 ('75?) computer show in Atlantic City. I then bought a bunch of bare boards from OSI (series 400). I got 16k worth of ram boards, and the CPU board. Their boards could be populated with either 8 or 12 bit memory, and 6502, 6800, or 6100 (cmos PDP 8!) processors. I also obtained MosTechnology's TIM monitor chip. I scored 16K worth of 2102 ram chips at a Ham flea market. I got the 400 series 6502 working with a CRT terminal (it was a bare populated board, no case) and a surplus keyboard. I never got beyond running tiny basic on it though.
I’m waiting to find an old box in an old barn or attic filled with New Old Stock. It’s already happened just waiting on time to catch up. Nice informative Video. Even Nicer “Junk”. As my wife says.
In order to align the jigs for a double sided board you simply have to put one side down before etching then drill a few holes and use them for alignment of the second side.
Back in the day most people had a TV, yes, but most people also had an assortment of radios, a cassette player, and/or phonographs. A hifi set containing all of the above was extremely common, then people often had portable cassette players, radios, etc.
And we were poor af... Didn't have a colour tv till about 1982 :) Mostly because my parents were somewhat fiscally responsible and prioritised getting a house :P
Oh lordy, it makes me feel so oooold, all that stuff was just coming up when I started work in microprocessors. Anyone want a z80 CP/M machine rotting in my garage? With a hard disk - whoa...
Great video! I found it via search about 70s kit computing out of curiosity and liked it. You gained a new sub! Now im going to watch the others as well. :)
@@TechTimeTraveller I just finished the video now, very well done and informative! Not enough peoples talk about these 70s kit computers on youtube it is mostly the 80s onward haha. Looking forward for that new episode you are cooking up! It would also be nice to see some of them in action you built as a repro or not. :)
These kits are neat as heck. My dad built an Altair some time before I was born. I'll have to look in the basement at my parents house to see if it's still there.
Some very nice vintage items:) But you should really build those kits and bring them to life. Right now they are dead and not very interesting except to us connoisseurs:) It's like those computer museums where nothing actually works....much better if everything could be running. I just found a very rare SC/MP kit, all there in the original folder, and I intend to build and connect it to the Teletype:) You are still preserving history by building them:))))
It's a tough one. I solicited a lot of opinions on this subject and it's 50/50. I do kind of agree a computer was meant to do something, not sit static on a shelf. But there is a lot of pressure to preserve history. I actually had an email conversation with Jon Titus himself about my Mark-8 boards and he felt they should remain as is. That's pretty tough to go against. :)
I've always wanted to know about early kit computers and how they compared to later computers you could buy, plus how they compare to today's kit computers.
The only thing missing from this is a cameo by Steve Ciarcia ! Ask him, you might get lucky 😘 P.S. I started with a Signetics 2650 (KT-9500 board) SWTPC keyboard and ...
Lancaster's TVT-6 design uses the CPU to "execute" the display in the same way the Sinclair ZX80 does. I wonder whether Sinclair was inspired by Lancaster here.
I have a BYT-8 Chassis with a 10 slot S-100 bus board. No display switches. This was the home to ‘Seattle Computer Products’ S-100 8086 motherboard running Quick and Dirty DOS. Will have to ask my brother what happen to the boards.
The Color Computer used and almost identical joystick -- just two potentiometers mounted at right-angles to each other. Ergonomically they were marginally better than the PPG-J, but not by much. I think that the slider controls were used in a handful of Pong units, but they were not very common. I have never seen a stereo with a "joystick" to balance the speakers. Thanks for providing some context to the industrial design. You should store those original manuals and other paperwork somewhere other then the cardboard shipping boxes. Some items look a bit fragile already; flattening them into acid-free file folders will really help with long-term preservation.
I can get you in contact with Jeff Roloff - founder of Central Data and the designer of the Central Data 2650 (in his teens aka Woz brilliant). I'm sure he'd be happy to fill in every detail. My dad worked there for many years after Central Data evolved into a SCSI systems company.
Unfortunately no.. I have opted to leave them in their unbuilt form for historical reasons. The closest I have is an upcoming video regarding my TV Typewriter. I didn't have the actual kits boards for that, just the construction guide, but I built it similarly to how someone would have built one at the time, if they had used the plans to make their own boards as many did. That video will be out soonish.. just working on some animations and final edits.
We had Micro Bee 16s and 32s in Primary School, here in the outer suburbs of Sydney Australia. Maybe one or 2 computers per school year if we were lucky. I recall playing some maths program on the PC. I had to play the 'Show Pony' for the adults because I was Dux of Mathematics and Science. Not Dux of the year, because I could not spell, because who needs to put the effort into that when you have a word processor that can correct spelling and grammar. And "programme"? All good programmers know that this is spelled as "program". "Colour", or "Color"? Your best guess is as good as mein? Thanks for the memories, entertainment and sharing.
The price would be horrendous, the complexity and fragility also. (look at the LGA sockets people butcher when installing CPUs clumsily) There plenty of clone 8bit and misc SBC PCBs and kits out there. There are ancient 486 and Pentium motherboards out there, 90s stuff that is still kit like enough to be interesting (but slow), also Industrial ISA backplane stuff with x86 ISA SBCs to play with, cheap enough if do some hunting around.
@@joefish6091 but i would still love to assamble my own pc completly from scratch including soldering on all the components on evrey board (excluding the psu of course) including bga components (preferably preballed) and after it is assembled it wont turn on and the debugging would start (the best part)
Would have to see pictures. Feel free to email me at Brad at techtimetraveller dot com .. if they're early they sometimes don't have any manufacturer markings.
Bing image search, its likely you will see them in the results. but there were quite a few small companies that made computers and came and went, but statistically surviving ones are prob common ones.
I am in the process of trying to redesign the S-100 computer to use modern parts and have features that didn't exist in 1977. (HDMI, i2c, USB, HPIB, WIFI, M.2 SSD, etc) I would like in to use the TDL Xitan pinout, but use one of the unassigned pins as a alt-bus pinout for high performance CPUs (ARM, esp32, CM4, etc) Is there anyone out there interested in putting such an idea put into the works? I use KiCad...
Man. That bit about the difficulty of producing two layer pcbs really highlights how we're living in a different era. Nowadays there are fabs that'll make your custom 6-layer pcbs and ship them to your doorstep in days for a couple bucks.
I love these old kits and the custom machines I've seen you showcase and even try and repair. More of this please, you are excellent at it. But I really cringe at the "spouse made me sleep outside" jokes. These are cringeworthy and just extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine being married to someone who does not share or understand my passions. I imagine this is meant more as "tongue in cheek" and your wife is a lot more supportive and you both have a better relationship than this is implying. I hope anyways. But this is really dated Boomer humor that is centered around really terrible ideas that seem to position life partners as more of an antagonist in you life. And I feel weird using the term Boomer here; because I'm pretty sure I heard you say you were born in 1975 in another video. We are the exact same age, and that actually makes us Gen X. My wife is either sharing in my interests, or appreciative of my passions and hobbies. We've enriched each others lives sharing our hobbies and passions with each other. We are a team, and support and trust each other in our purchases and collections. A few months ago I lucked out and found a close friends primary grail for his collection for a third what it normally goes for. Still a substantial amount and outside of our budget at that time. And without hesitation she decided we would figure out how to make it work so we could get it for him. And we worked as a team to do it. Made my friends year. I sell largely vintage toys for a living...and am always confused and uncomfortable when guys come in and tell me they have to hide stuff from their wives, they'll get in trouble, some keep secret bank accounts just to buy collectibles. All very weird...and toxic. The older the guy, the more likely I hear stuff like this. If I made this kind of comment, my wife would be very confused...and hurt. We have a very joking banner with each other and make fun of each other all the time. Not much is off the table, we can get pretty dark even. This kind of joke would literally hurt her feelings and probably do some real harm to the trust between us for some time. The joke would do more damage just for being said than they imply would happen for buying some expensive old computer kit. This is coming off kind of ranty. I'm sorry. I'm just so freaking tire of hearing this kind of "I hate my spouse/my spouse hates me" humor (which this is a form of), and you use it over and over in this otherwise awesome video. And I hate seeing this attitude spread and normalized. There are loads of better jokes you can make about the cost of some of these kits. A bunch of terrible jokes are better than repeating this crap over and over.
It's all in jest. My wife really doesn't like the computer hobby though, although I think she finds it marginally preferable to other hobbies I could have. I know a fair number of collectors and we are all in that boat. It's not a hobby most people period understand. The jokes just poke fun at the light tension that exists for many hobbyists with their spouses.
Think of the cost of those early computers, $1K for Altair stuff, $3K for Cromeco, car prices. A hobby for single men or rich husbands. There must have been some divorces happening over computer purchases, the final straw etc.
This tingled all the right nostalgia tingles. Great video! P.S.: Whenever I hear 8085, I think about the awesome TRS-80 Model 100 Portable Computer. Bill Gates himself worked on its firmware. This may be the last time he could be credited as lead programmer on a consumer project.
This video is a great description of early computer kits and brought back a few memories. I didn't get started with computers until the 70s. My first home computer was Tandy's TRS-80, which made computing fun for me and many others.
I saw this as an ad and I thought it's gonna be one of those scammy weird videos but I was wrong. This is an awesome video, as is your channel! Keep it on! I'll definitely subscribe and stay!
I was a bit reluctant to use ads, but I figured it was that or languish in obscurity unless/until the TH-cam algorithm found me. Anyway thanks so much for taking a chance!!
Liked, commented, subscribed, rang the bell. Thanks for the advertisement. It turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be. Thank you for a well researched and presented video. You could have done an individual video on each kit. I love looking at the primordial soup origins of the computer revolution. I’m just amazed at the quality of this video. Looking forward to future videos. In the mean time I’ll go look at your other uploads.
Many thanks! Really appreciate the vote of confidence. I'm really enjoying playing around with special fx and am trying to present the info in a way that doesn't put people to sleep!
Alright, where do I begin, ads? I hate ads. Never click em. Like not ever. But this one was intriguing and I got nothing better going on at four in the morning. So anyway, here I am two and a half minutes in and you have a new followe! So glad I clicked your ad. I am really looking forward to watching your channel grow!
SO impressed by this. I'm honored to be your 1000th "like" on this video, and you have most decidedly won me over! This mirrors so well what I like to do on my channel "Forgotten Machines". Thank you for preserving and documenting these systems so well!
Amazing video!! You deserve more subs. Also, it’s a dream of mine to find an unbuilt computer kit for cheap at an estate sale etc. You’ve got a great collection.
Many thanks. I had a lot of fun with this one, esp. the green screen effects. I'm going to keep at it and keep trying to lift the quality. Your kind words are super helpful and appreciated! And motivating!
Thank you to everyone who took a chance, clicked on my Ad and came to watch this video. I created this channel after the inadvertent demise of my original channel, BradH. BradH was one of those 'channels' that just got autocreated because I wanted to comment on something, or share videos of the kids with my Mom, etc. I also shared videos of my vintage computers there, basically home videos... no editing. I'd always wanted to create more 'formal' videos - videos with decentish lighting, maybe a few special effects. Particularly documentaries as I've been in love with those my whole life. My first attempt at this was the Digital Group Z80 video - shot with a handy cam and minimally edited. Several years later, I decided to really go for it and did my first 'documentary-style' video featuring the OSI 300 trainer board. That video earned the notice of hackaday and did pretty well, which was really exciting as a new 'creator'. I followed up with this Unbuilt Kits video and so on.
Eventually I decided I wanted to separate the 'formal' videos from the home videos, choose a more descriptive channel name and such, so I set up a branding account. Unfortunately in the process, I managed to delete the original channel, which was unrecoverable. So I set this one up, hastily reuploaded (which is why many videos are within weeks of each other) and took the huge penalty in exposure that comes with starting all over again. Since then I've created some small 'tour' videos (8BitBites) and have been working on a bunch of projects soon to come.
Anyway, I sincerely appreciate everyone who took a risk and clicked on that Ad, not knowing if they were going to be sucker punched into buying something, or Rickrolled, or worse. But that was never the intent - this channel is produced for the joy of it. There is no Patreon, no tshirts to sell, none of that for the forseeable future. It's like Biff said in Back to the Future II, relating what his future self told him about the Sports Almanac: "No catch." I've so enjoyed the learning process - probably my favorite thing was messing around with the green screen - and the joy of seeing it all come to life onscreen. I decided to go the Ad route for two reasons - one was to put some skin in the game and push myself to keep going, and the other was to try and recover from the loss of the old channel. TH-cam is a hard place for small, 'new' channels to get noticed.
It is deeply moving to have even one person compliment your work, let alone a whole bunch, let alone, as of this writing, 171 people who actually took the time and the extra step to click Subscribe. Thank you so much for the kind words and those votes of confidence. It means the world to me and motivates me to keep doing, keep learning, and hopefully, keep entertaining. Thank you, thank you, thank you - BradH.
No problem
honestly this is the first ad i've ever liked, ive been interested in making computers and this might be just what i need
I saw the ad and decided to put it in watch later, since this sort of video would normally be something I'd click on immediately - but the ad part definitely put me off. Glad I took that chance though, it was quite an entertaining video - subscribed and best of luck with the channel!
I like this, I like it a lot.
THis is great video quality! I expect this will get much more popular. Good job!
Hi. I am the David Griffiths who designed the DG680. Thanks for the nice review.
In answer to your question about the numbering, the VDU was first described in Electronics Today magazine and they assigned it project number 640. When I wrote the article about the CPU they called it 680. I am not sure whether that was the next number in their sequence or whether they jumped to 680 in a nod to the Z80. Applied Technology, the company that sold the kits, tended to brand it as DG-Z80.
I don't remember what the selling price was but I think you are in the right ball park.
You are right about the DG initials but I later formed a company called Digital Graphics Pty Ltd - what an amazing co-incidence about the initials ;-)
Thank you for this note! It is always an honor to 'meet' the people who designed and made this stuff work. I wondered about those model numbers! I keep hoping to stumble on a DG640. Do you know how well the kits sold?
@@TechTimeTraveller I think there would have been roughly the same number of DG640 or slightly more. Some people used the DG640 with different processors. I don't know the actual numbers but in the low thousands - small beans compared to the US market. I might have been rich now if I'd live somewhere else :-)
@@diggraph Thanks David for designing those boards, they came along at a time I was a high school student, and I learned a lot. My only wish was that the PCG was a full bit-mapped screen instead of a character rom set replacement. I spent a long time trying to devise a Least-Used system for recycling PCG chars, never got it to work properly. DGOS was a great little monitor!
First time I've gotten an ad on this site that actually looked interesting. I've been looking for more channels focused on vintage computing, but beyond the few big ones, had no clue where to find them. Subscribed 😊
This is very interesting I learned quite a bit and the quality is pretty good.
I have a Commodore MOS KIM-1 myself. This presentation is awesome as this hardware predates commercial production of personal computers and geared towards industrial, scientific/academic and hobbyists.
Fantastic channel. I've been watching for awhile now. Absolutely love your sense of humor!
Thank you!
This is a great video, I really loved it. Reminds me of the ZX spectrum clones my dad built in the Soviet Union.
Can You Send Me A Link So I Can Buy One? (In English With A Coding Manual Of Course)
@@seamusquain2706 I don't think it'd be possible to buy one new nowadays, but I've seen them go up for sale on eBay. Keep in mind they all run on 220v so you would need a transformer, and afaik they all run basic (in English too)
@@seamusquain2706 There is someone on Ebay selling a Russian sinclair clone kit, but your chances of it working on many types of video display areslim, and software compatibility with real ZXs is poor.
Absolutely fascinating and some rare gems there, for sure.
When I was in college in NYC back in the 70's, I was a member of a computer club in Long Island. There were at least 3 people in the club who had built Mark-8's, and there were one or two under construction. At every meeting we would have people bringing in their machines and demonstrating them work. The MARK-8s sometimes played music either via a speaker hooked up to an output port, or by making noise on a transistor radio. I remember that two of those Mark 8's were expanded machines, housed in large cabinets (internal separate power supplies). I don't know if those were kits or home made PCBs.
In an attempt to build a PIC-A-STAR amateur radio transceiver using DSP, I actually have made some of my own double sided boards using toner transfer. It's a bear to do. I first put the resist on one side and spray paint the other side to protect from the etchant. I then etch the board, I used a mix of 2 parts H2O2, with 1 part of Muriatacid (Diluted HCL, sold to adjust swimming pool PH). After the first side is etched, I removed the paint and the resist with mineral spirits. Now I drill a few key holes to help me align the second side toner transfer. The PCB design artwork has a few "bullet points" on it for this purpose. With the second side resist ironed on, I spray paint the etched side and throw the board in the etchant again. Again remove paint and resist, clean, dry.
The PCBs I made were for high density SMT parts, through hole 'jellybean" parts, and the usual gang of connectors. The 100 mill through hole parts spacing actually ended up aligning close enough for the dual side layout not to short circuit, or not circuit. I used "Augat" sockets which stand proud of the board by about 1mm, you can solder these on both sides of the board. So homemade double sided boards are not impossible, but these day you will just use Kicad to design them, and send off to China to get them made.
I love the little skits that intersperse your videos :D
4:44 My brother and I built a number of Applied Tech's S100 boards (actually 'S-100' back then) and also the black cardframe. It was a good system and the DGOS ("dee-goss") monitor with hex editor on 2716 was pretty easy to use and could save to tape.
It was all fine until one Saturday we went to Applied Tech's shop in a northern suburb of Sydney only to find not a trace of their S100 machines anymore. They had all gone and been replaced by the Microbee. The CEO of AT told us it was backwards compatible with the S100 system and that Microbee software would run on our machine.
Well of course it wasn't that simple. The Microbee had a different keyboard setup which IIRC used the light pen input on the 6845 and any Microbee software needed patching to use the DGOS calls. I did do it for a few programs. Needless to say we were very annoyed about it all, after having spent a lot of money on building the computer.
I modified the DG680 with a rocker switch on the top edge of the board to switch a 4MHx crystal, and replaced the CPU with a Z80A and it ran really well. Sometimes I could even switch from 2 to 4 MHz and it would continue to run but more often it needed a reset. I think the DG640 VDU was based on the SOL-20 video circuitry, certainly AT sold games such as Missile Defence that displayed 'Processor Technology' on the start screen.
As the supplied MicroWorld BASIC was not very good, I ported TRS-80 LII BASIC to the machine by typing in the 12K of hex digits from the BASIC Decoded book over a few weeks, patched the keyboard and (I think) video start location. I made a replica TRS80 graphics character set for the PCG card and got MS Flight Simulator to run, made a 4 voice music synth speaker for it (from a BYTE article), also started writing a DOS for a Versafloppy II based on another BYTE article. I still have some of these bits of software, the rest went with the machine a long time ago.
damn wtf, i was doing something while watching and i looked up and was baffled by the sub count. keep the videos up man
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Hatsune D00D nice
Sameeeee hahaha
I'm so pleased I found this channel, content that's right up my street produced in an enjoyable way. Splendid stuff!
Wow... What a true hidden gem your channel is! It's sad it took me this long to be redirected/brought to it by TH-cam's algorithms.
Wow !!!!!! im blown away !!!! such awesome stuff !!!!!!
I absolutely adore your skits, sir~! It gets so old watching all these kids on yt using the same stock footage over and over while doing monologues.. Your Style is Remarkably Refreshing and You put out such Fun content!!! I'm learning so much! Thank You!
Many thanks! The skits came about because I couldn't find images to fill narration time and I didn't want to spend on stock footage. I thought they would be fun to do, kind of an homage to silent film (except my Dr. Claw impression) and give the channel kind of a homey feel. Really glad people are enjoying them instead of being like 'omg what a loser hahahahaha' :)
Dang, 1K of RAM taking up an entire circuit board. Folks back then really knew their stuff compared to today.
Thank you youtube for recommending this to me
This is great stuff, can’t wait to watch more :)
Aussie Lad here. Yeah, Al-foil on polystyrene was the standard for me growing up. There was some chips stored on good antistatic foam, but most of the time it just crumbled into a gross dust. Im not sure if it was the climate or they just sent the junk out to the colonies. I’ve found huge panels of chips done this way when digging through storage at work, obviously not original packaging, but re-packed for storage (in the 80’s, I found this in about 2015). But dad had a few boxes of parts from when he worked as a photocopier tech, hes more of a mechanic, but I found enough opamps and 74xx chips to get into mischief.
Electronics Australia has a long and colourful history, but I can blame/thank them for a lot, I got my first copy in ‘95. I could wax lyrical, but to keep on topic, they also got me into the hardware of computing. They had a series of articles, The $100 PC, which pointed out if you didnt need the top of the line $3000 Pentium, a very capable machine could be built from parts for bugger all. A bit of scrounging, troubleshooting, fleamarkets n hand-me-downs. This is pre-internet, so a bunch of articles telling you what to look for and the obvious Gotchya’s was priceless. As a pre-teen, that became my mission. Christmas and birthday money, dumpster diving at my Dad and Uncles work, picking the brain of the local computer shop, I had **MY** pc. There was the family computer, but I was forbidden to take the lid of that. So I built my own. My mates had a Nintendo or a Sega. I had a Computer.
I now collect old electronics magazines, and had I been born a generation before, I 100% would have built myself a S100 system. Im half tempted to now, just for shits and giggles.
Yeah that special static foam I think always goes nasty.. you probably saw that in the video at various points. I think it needs very specific climate conditions and even then it degrades. EA is a great magazine.. I have been poring over articles as something I'm hoping to do with the channel is revive old electronics projects from magazines like that. I can't remember if EA published the Educ8 ? But stuff like that is really interesting to me.
That was a sweet Dr. claw impersonation at 13:40. 10/10.
Haha! Thank you! I've done a few of those.. one is about halfway into my Computerland video and I think the other is in one of my Unfridging videos. Those two feature an actual 'appearance'.
Fascinating, so many systems vying for the new market.
This channel is a hidden gem! You’re way more in depth than the 8-Bit Guy, and you’ve discuss BBS which he has yet to do.
Great video :)
I still have some Don Lancaster books, specifically TTL cookbook and CMOS cookbook. He describes the TV typewriter in the ttl cookbook. Used these books in the 80s and 90s before datasets were easily available via the Internet. I feel old now.
I'm not sure why this was in my recommended, but I'm glad it was. Great video, buddy!
Giving the originals to the museum is a good gesture. But before that, make as many good copies of it as possible, so that others can learn from it. That is what the makers would have wanted. Maybe take out a few little mistakes, improve it a bit here and there, nothing wrong with that.
Having to think in a structured manner is good for kids. Building something from scratch is good too. Neither is there something wrong with making a few buck by selling replicas. Information is free, it has to be spread to have effect. Carry on, you do good work.
This is Great glad the algorithm Brough this me this I'm now subscription 436
Thanks so much for checking it out! Appreciate the sub!
This channel deserves more views! Hope you keep it up :)
Many thanks for the vote of confidence. It's a hard road for a new channel but I do it for the enjoyment of it. Many more to come.
My dad built a Heath H88/89 back when I was in elementary school (around '79). He still has it and says it should still run if he replaced the power supply in it. I can remember learning BASIC on it and my dad upgrading it from a H88 w/16k to a H89 with 2 floppy drives.
Even though the second drive isn't around anymore, I'd love to get ahold of some hard sector floppies and the OS for that beast and see if I could relive some of my childhood days on it.
I have an H88 here... I'd love to get my hands on the original H9 terminal they had for it. Pretty cool machine. When you use the front panel it feels like you're programming the time machine from Back to the Future.
Dude I learned a lot and your vids look cool how u only have 750 suubs you should have 100k I'm subbing
Much appreciated. It takes time for TH-cam to notice a channel. Right now I'd be thrilled if we hit 1000!
I had a friend (sadly now dead) who used to build the old kit computers that used switches and a momentary button to enter data into the computer and the output was via lights.
I was just reading about Mk 8 earlier today and YT recommended this video. Darn computers have gotten wicked smart since Mk 8.
Or creepy.. a while back I was in a Walmart and remarked to my wife about the presence of the C64 Mini on a shelf. Didn't pick it up or look it up on my phone, just mentioned it in passing, yet not 30 seconds later I had a Facebook ad offering it at another store for 20% less!
Back in the day, WAY back (1978-1980), I worked for a process control company. One of my contracts was Fortin Laminating that manufactured bare circuit board. Makes me wonder if any of their products ended up in these kits.
I got the Central Data 2650 back in the day and built it. I didn't have a parallel ASCII keyboard so used an AIM65 to provide that function. The CD2650 still works. I am thinking of expanding it and putting it into a nice perspex case. I have a spare C64 keyboard which I will use instead of having to get out the AIM65.
Very cool! If you decide to take some pictures or video please let me know. Would love to see one assembled! Apparently there was an expansion kit of some kind? I saw a pic of it on old-computers.com I think. Looked like S100 or something similar.
@@TechTimeTraveller : As someone who cut my home-computer teeth on my Central Data 2650, I can confirm that the expansion you're thinking of is Central Data's S-100 expansion board. I used mine to expand the RAM and add Central Data's floppy-controller board. (Every few years I search to see what's out there on the CD 2650, and wow I found a lot this time, including your video! I know I'll be restoring mine at some point, so I keep gathering as much info as I can toward that day. And I'm happy to answer any CD 2650 questions that my aging memory will let me - it was my only computer for a few years in the late 70s so I knew it extremely well.)
@@gordonbrandly4352 Many thanks for the reply! I actually very recently got my hands on a built CD2650 and the S100 expansion board. They look to be in pretty close to pristine condition, but are missing the interconnect cables that link them. I went through the old Radio Electronics articles and sort of followed it month to month hoping to find where they introduced the S100 expansion board, but alas.. no sign of that. I suppose it could have come out months after the original article, or maybe not even been an article at all. Any info you have would be deeply appreciated for sure!
@@TechTimeTraveller : Excellent! And yes as you suspected, that S-100 board came out a couple of years after the original magazine article. I have all that stuff squirrelled away in my garage, and I'm hoping I still have the manuals as well. You've given me more incentive to look for it now, though work is busy and it might still be a while before I can get to it. But I'll make a note to look as soon as I can and contact you if I find any of that. I could always haul my main board assembly into the house and take pictures of how those two boards are connected, at least. I'll need to take those pictures sooner or later anyway. :)
If I could buy a kit laptop today, I would be soooo happy.
What a fascinating collection! I started building (mostly) retro kit computers last year, and I just finished a slightly-updated reproduction of the "78up5" Signetics 2650 Mini System (also published in Electronics Australia as an update to the slightly older one you showed, I believe) a couple days ago. Having proved that it works as advertised (I can enter machine code into the PIPBUG system monitor via serial terminal, then execute that code and see the output), I'm please with the result but not sure what else to do with it now, hehe. Documentation I've found suggests that, at one time, there was commercial software available for it, as well as upgrade projects, but I haven't found the binaries for any of the software yet, and the old magazine articles that describe projects are not in the greatest, most readable state. Oh, well. It was fun, just the same, and there's always the future!
Other kits I've built use the RCA COSMAC 1802, Zilog Z80 and Z180, Intel 8080A and 8085, MOS 65C02, and Rockwell 6501Q. I even just today looked at websites offering kits of boards to build your own reproduction Schelbi-8H or 8B and Mark 8, but the prices, just for the boards, are a little eye watering, so I think I'll have to skip those. :-O
Thank you so much for showing us your fine collection of original, vintage kits! :-)
All of a sudden my rasp[berry pi's seem less daunting. To the OG computer guys out there you have my respect.
A lot of the hardcore OG computer people were electronics engineers and techs, these half built things are from people who fancied having a go but for whatever reason gave up.
I've etched and drilled my own double sided boards from artwork using the toner transfer method. The technique is to transfer toner pattern to one side of the board (with a clothes iron), and then spray paint the other side to protect the copper during etching. Etch the board, then drill a few key holes that are the alignment markers with the other side. Remove the spray paint from the reverse side, and then transfer the toner to the now blank side. Use push pins in the alignment holes to insure that the second side pattern lines up, then iron on the reverse side pattern. I usually do the most complex side first. Spray paint the etched side, and then etch the second side. Then remove the paint and resist from both sides. Drill out the board. Hopefully, if the artwork was good, and your alignment close, the holes will all line up. I usually didn't get 100% perfect alignment, but it was close enough to be able to connect both sides without shorts. Double sided board artwork designed for home etching will usually have lots of wire via holes. In some places soldering a part on both sides performs this function. Augat sockets that mount about 1-2 mm proud of the board can be soldered on both sides. I am building a DSP ham transceiver called the Pic-a-Star, and have etched some double sided boards that use SMT parts. The most complex part was the DSP processor board, DSP codec board, and mother board. All double sided (though 80% of the tracking was contained on one side). The DSP module works. :-) Gluing two boards together is an interesting approach, but you CAN home etch a double sided board.
I have mixed feelings about not building those kits. I see MANY classic unbuilt Heathkits on ebay. In many cases the collectors won't even OPEN the box as they feel that devalues the kit. (But then how do you know that you didn't just buy a box full of rocks?) Sadly, even if you wanted to build some of those kits you'd first have to buy new capacitors as the ones supplied with the kit have probably all dried up and are now useless. You should quickly remove all those IC's from the old black foam, I recently discovered some parts I'd had in storage for some 40 years with the IC pins completely rotted away! I was able to salvage some by soldering them into Augat sockets. BTW, there is a basic language for the 8008 that was published in book form. (The code is supplied in both 8008 and 8080 versions).
I started out in computers by getting a 6502 processor at MosTechnology's booth during the 1976 ('75?) computer show in Atlantic City. I then bought a bunch of bare boards from OSI (series 400). I got 16k worth of ram boards, and the CPU board. Their boards could be populated with either 8 or 12 bit memory, and 6502, 6800, or 6100 (cmos PDP 8!) processors. I also obtained MosTechnology's TIM monitor chip. I scored 16K worth of 2102 ram chips at a Ham flea market. I got the 400 series 6502 working with a CRT terminal (it was a bare populated board, no case) and a surplus keyboard. I never got beyond running tiny basic on it though.
This is the only ad that I actually liked. Thank you for making this an ad, and not some guys mixtape.
And thank you for taking a chance! I've got a bunch more like this coming soon!
@@TechTimeTraveller Cool! I will be watching them when they come out!
I’m waiting to find an old box in an old barn or attic filled with New Old Stock. It’s already happened just waiting on time to catch up.
Nice informative Video.
Even Nicer “Junk”.
As my wife says.
In order to align the jigs for a double sided board you simply have to put one side down before etching then drill a few holes and use them for alignment of the second side.
Back in the day most people had a TV, yes, but most people also had an assortment of radios, a cassette player, and/or phonographs. A hifi set containing all of the above was extremely common, then people often had portable cassette players, radios, etc.
And we were poor af... Didn't have a colour tv till about 1982 :) Mostly because my parents were somewhat fiscally responsible and prioritised getting a house :P
Oh lordy, it makes me feel so oooold, all that stuff was just coming up when I started work in microprocessors.
Anyone want a z80 CP/M machine rotting in my garage? With a hard disk - whoa...
My Uncle Leo Silvan owned Techniques... forwarded this video to my cousin if there is any more to the Mark-8 story.
Great video! I found it via search about 70s kit computing out of curiosity and liked it. You gained a new sub! Now im going to watch the others as well. :)
Much appreciated! Glad it is proving informative. I am working on a video featuring the TV Typewriter that I hope will be similarly interesting.
@@TechTimeTraveller I just finished the video now, very well done and informative! Not enough peoples talk about these 70s kit computers on youtube it is mostly the 80s onward haha. Looking forward for that new episode you are cooking up! It would also be nice to see some of them in action you built as a repro or not. :)
Thanks 👍
I am now addicted to computer kits. I need serious help, I have like 4 now. Sure, they all "do the same thing" but OH MY GOD THEY'RE SO FUN
What a fascinating and well made video. My interests are more 80s/early 90s computing, but this was so good, accet a brand new subscriber :)
Many thanks!!
These kits are neat as heck. My dad built an Altair some time before I was born. I'll have to look in the basement at my parents house to see if it's still there.
That would be amazing. Altairs are worth $$$$$ right now. I'm still hoping to find one myself one day.
Great ad great video
Some very nice vintage items:)
But you should really build those kits and bring them to life.
Right now they are dead and not very interesting except to us connoisseurs:) It's like those computer museums where nothing actually works....much better if everything could be running.
I just found a very rare SC/MP kit, all there in the original folder, and I intend to build and connect it to the Teletype:)
You are still preserving history by building them:))))
It's a tough one. I solicited a lot of opinions on this subject and it's 50/50. I do kind of agree a computer was meant to do something, not sit static on a shelf. But there is a lot of pressure to preserve history. I actually had an email conversation with Jon Titus himself about my Mark-8 boards and he felt they should remain as is. That's pretty tough to go against. :)
I've always wanted to know about early kit computers and how they compared to later computers you could buy, plus how they compare to today's kit computers.
Hit me up if you ever want to replicate those PCBs. It's something I'd love to play with and these days professional PCBs are cheap.
The only thing missing from this is a cameo by Steve Ciarcia !
Ask him, you might get lucky 😘
P.S. I started with a Signetics 2650 (KT-9500 board) SWTPC keyboard and ...
Lancaster's TVT-6 design uses the CPU to "execute" the display in the same way the Sinclair ZX80 does. I wonder whether Sinclair was inspired by Lancaster here.
Wait...Kit computers were a thing in the 70's? I thought that was a more recent thing!
@TechTimeTraveller Do you know where I can acquire those solder sockets that are on a reel?
Some of MIL's early chip packages were quite strange.
I have a BYT-8 Chassis with a 10 slot S-100 bus board. No display switches. This was the home to ‘Seattle Computer Products’ S-100 8086 motherboard running Quick and Dirty DOS. Will have to ask my brother what happen to the boards.
Muchas gracias por este video super informativo!! Lo disfrute
The Color Computer used and almost identical joystick -- just two potentiometers mounted at right-angles to each other. Ergonomically they were marginally better than the PPG-J, but not by much.
I think that the slider controls were used in a handful of Pong units, but they were not very common.
I have never seen a stereo with a "joystick" to balance the speakers. Thanks for providing some context to the industrial design.
You should store those original manuals and other paperwork somewhere other then the cardboard shipping boxes. Some items look a bit fragile already; flattening them into acid-free file folders will really help with long-term preservation.
I can get you in contact with Jeff Roloff - founder of Central Data and the designer of the Central Data 2650 (in his teens aka Woz brilliant). I'm sure he'd be happy to fill in every detail. My dad worked there for many years after Central Data evolved into a SCSI systems company.
Do you have a video of you building one of these kits?
Unfortunately no.. I have opted to leave them in their unbuilt form for historical reasons. The closest I have is an upcoming video regarding my TV Typewriter. I didn't have the actual kits boards for that, just the construction guide, but I built it similarly to how someone would have built one at the time, if they had used the plans to make their own boards as many did. That video will be out soonish.. just working on some animations and final edits.
We had Micro Bee 16s and 32s in Primary School, here in the outer suburbs of Sydney Australia. Maybe one or 2 computers per school year if we were lucky. I recall playing some maths program on the PC. I had to play the 'Show Pony' for the adults because I was Dux of Mathematics and Science. Not Dux of the year, because I could not spell, because who needs to put the effort into that when you have a word processor that can correct spelling and grammar. And "programme"? All good programmers know that this is spelled as "program". "Colour", or "Color"? Your best guess is as good as mein? Thanks for the memories, entertainment and sharing.
I remember in my day no one ever showed how to etch boards
It all looks pretty hokey today but back in the day this stuff was science fiction.
i would love if modern pc mainboards came optionaly in a kit variant (maybe with the plastic cpu socket presolderd) i even would pay 100$ extra
The price would be horrendous, the complexity and fragility also. (look at the LGA sockets people butcher when installing CPUs clumsily)
There plenty of clone 8bit and misc SBC PCBs and kits out there.
There are ancient 486 and Pentium motherboards out there, 90s stuff that is still kit like enough to be interesting (but slow), also Industrial ISA backplane stuff with x86 ISA SBCs to play with, cheap enough if do some hunting around.
@@joefish6091 but i would still love to assamble my own pc completly from scratch including soldering on all the components on evrey board (excluding the psu of course) including bga components (preferably preballed) and after it is assembled it wont turn on and the debugging would start (the best part)
I had a chance in the mid 90s to buy both an unassembled IMSAI and Altair for $100... I've been kicking myself for years for not buying them.
That hurts! Although, having unbuilt is kind of a tricky thing.. unbuilt doesn't do anything but building it is heresy to some.
This is fantastic content. Cannot believe there are less than 1000 people subcribed. @CallyWasHere
Hey ive come across a few kit computers from the 70's no idea what brands they are do you have any tips to figure that out?
Would have to see pictures. Feel free to email me at Brad at techtimetraveller dot com .. if they're early they sometimes don't have any manufacturer markings.
Bing image search, its likely you will see them in the results. but there were quite a few small companies that made computers and came and went,
but statistically surviving ones are prob common ones.
Actually glad I clicked that ad
Many thanks. I hesitated about using ads to promote the channel as the Ad tag is kind of a scarlet letter, but I think it is working out alright!
I am in the process of trying to redesign the S-100 computer to use modern parts and
have features that didn't exist in 1977. (HDMI, i2c, USB, HPIB, WIFI, M.2 SSD, etc)
I would like in to use the TDL Xitan pinout, but use one of the unassigned pins
as a alt-bus pinout for high performance CPUs (ARM, esp32, CM4, etc)
Is there anyone out there interested in putting such an idea put into the works?
I use KiCad...
Why would anybody dislike this video? : /
Who's worse: People who bought computer kits and never built them, or people who buy them 40 years later?
1 + 1 = 10 what else would it be?
remember Heath kit
Yes I have some Heathkit stuff, including the H88. Just got it working recently!
Love this shit
"COMPUTER!"
Very nice, thank you for this. Please consider wearing gloves when handling this stuff. Thanks for your time.
Man. That bit about the difficulty of producing two layer pcbs really highlights how we're living in a different era. Nowadays there are fabs that'll make your custom 6-layer pcbs and ship them to your doorstep in days for a couple bucks.
17:27 ...also known as "Marvin."
Chevy? I thought you were an Edsel enthusiest
Unfortunately my last Edsel was sold just recently. Too rusty. I still love Edsels but I love Chevys too.
I like this video, but its background music got on my nerves after a while.`
if you read this, you are so funny
I love these old kits and the custom machines I've seen you showcase and even try and repair. More of this please, you are excellent at it.
But I really cringe at the "spouse made me sleep outside" jokes. These are cringeworthy and just extremely uncomfortable. I can't imagine being married to someone who does not share or understand my passions.
I imagine this is meant more as "tongue in cheek" and your wife is a lot more supportive and you both have a better relationship than this is implying. I hope anyways. But this is really dated Boomer humor that is centered around really terrible ideas that seem to position life partners as more of an antagonist in you life.
And I feel weird using the term Boomer here; because I'm pretty sure I heard you say you were born in 1975 in another video. We are the exact same age, and that actually makes us Gen X.
My wife is either sharing in my interests, or appreciative of my passions and hobbies. We've enriched each others lives sharing our hobbies and passions with each other. We are a team, and support and trust each other in our purchases and collections. A few months ago I lucked out and found a close friends primary grail for his collection for a third what it normally goes for. Still a substantial amount and outside of our budget at that time.
And without hesitation she decided we would figure out how to make it work so we could get it for him. And we worked as a team to do it. Made my friends year.
I sell largely vintage toys for a living...and am always confused and uncomfortable when guys come in and tell me they have to hide stuff from their wives, they'll get in trouble, some keep secret bank accounts just to buy collectibles. All very weird...and toxic. The older the guy, the more likely I hear stuff like this.
If I made this kind of comment, my wife would be very confused...and hurt. We have a very joking banner with each other and make fun of each other all the time. Not much is off the table, we can get pretty dark even. This kind of joke would literally hurt her feelings and probably do some real harm to the trust between us for some time. The joke would do more damage just for being said than they imply would happen for buying some expensive old computer kit.
This is coming off kind of ranty. I'm sorry. I'm just so freaking tire of hearing this kind of "I hate my spouse/my spouse hates me" humor (which this is a form of), and you use it over and over in this otherwise awesome video.
And I hate seeing this attitude spread and normalized. There are loads of better jokes you can make about the cost of some of these kits. A bunch of terrible jokes are better than repeating this crap over and over.
It's all in jest. My wife really doesn't like the computer hobby though, although I think she finds it marginally preferable to other hobbies I could have. I know a fair number of collectors and we are all in that boat. It's not a hobby most people period understand. The jokes just poke fun at the light tension that exists for many hobbyists with their spouses.
Think of the cost of those early computers, $1K for Altair stuff, $3K for Cromeco, car prices. A hobby for single men or rich husbands. There must have been some divorces happening over computer purchases, the final straw etc.
The Heathkit H11 computer (a PDP 11/?? computer) at an ULTRA LOW price, ...IT WAS A BARGAIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
0:53 wait hole up. "Altair Cyclops Camera". "Camera Controller Card". What the?
Edit: Holy crap! en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cromemco_Cyclops
"...since I am situated only about 50 miles south of the Australian capital city of Whistler, British Columbia..."
i see what you did there ; )
This tingled all the right nostalgia tingles. Great video! P.S.: Whenever I hear 8085, I think about the awesome TRS-80 Model 100 Portable Computer. Bill Gates himself worked on its firmware. This may be the last time he could be credited as lead programmer on a consumer project.
There is still active development on the Australian TEC-1 including new PCB's, check the Australian Vintage Computer Collectors group on FB.
This video is a great description of early computer kits and brought back a few memories. I didn't get started with computers until the 70s. My first home computer was Tandy's TRS-80, which made computing fun for me and many others.
I saw this as an ad and I thought it's gonna be one of those scammy weird videos but I was wrong. This is an awesome video, as is your channel! Keep it on! I'll definitely subscribe and stay!
I was a bit reluctant to use ads, but I figured it was that or languish in obscurity unless/until the TH-cam algorithm found me. Anyway thanks so much for taking a chance!!
Liked, commented, subscribed, rang the bell. Thanks for the advertisement. It turned out to be exactly what I hoped it would be. Thank you for a well researched and presented video. You could have done an individual video on each kit. I love looking at the primordial soup origins of the computer revolution. I’m just amazed at the quality of this video. Looking forward to future videos. In the mean time I’ll go look at your other uploads.
Many thanks! Really appreciate the vote of confidence. I'm really enjoying playing around with special fx and am trying to present the info in a way that doesn't put people to sleep!
Alright, where do I begin, ads? I hate ads. Never click em. Like not ever. But this one was intriguing and I got nothing better going on at four in the morning. So anyway, here I am two and a half minutes in and you have a new followe! So glad I clicked your ad. I am really looking forward to watching your channel grow!
If thou' cannot run Zork 1,2,&3 on your home computer, THY' PC SUCKS! No computer should run without one!
SO impressed by this. I'm honored to be your 1000th "like" on this video, and you have most decidedly won me over! This mirrors so well what I like to do on my channel "Forgotten Machines". Thank you for preserving and documenting these systems so well!
The question is, what people were doing with these? Even useless home micros could act as a programmable calculators, but those?
Cool video 👍👌😎
Amazing video!! You deserve more subs.
Also, it’s a dream of mine to find an unbuilt computer kit for cheap at an estate sale etc. You’ve got a great collection.
Many thanks. I had a lot of fun with this one, esp. the green screen effects. I'm going to keep at it and keep trying to lift the quality. Your kind words are super helpful and appreciated! And motivating!
Now *this* is an advertisement I could get behind.
Thank you! I hesitated about using an ad to raise the channel profile but I thought it worth a gamble.
@@TechTimeTraveller It's better than the crap I usually see in the ad box.