NYC Resistor

During Hackday I worked on a display for the Stabby ID.

I have six or so HDSP 2111 units lying around. They also come in green and red led models.

Read on for Schematic and Demo Arduino Source
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I gave Zach several months to post this. And he hasn’t. I am not sure why, but it’s probably because he’s too busy advancing his skills and the capacity of his makerbots to take the time. A few months ago we hosted an amazing hackathon at NYC Resistor. During that event Bill was hard at work getting to grips with how the model 15-ro teletype, that I bought on e-bay for a dollar, operated.

It turns out the teletype only has 2 electromechanical parts… the motor and an actuator. Everything else is mechanical. All the amazing engineering and mind blowing beauty aside… that makes it very difficult to debug the device. So while Bill was struggling to step the device through it’s instructions Zach was building and perfecting yet another makerbot.

As the two of them conversed about their trials and tribulations Zach set out to use his makerbot to help Bill out. He designed a gear that bill could use to manually advance the main rotational shaft in the device and thusly step through instructions. Moderately simple little thing, but obviously designing these obvious components is… somewhat harder than it looks.

The amazing part to me isn’t the component made by zach, or the teletype. It’s the fusion of a prototyped component made using 2010 technology used to solve a problem on a 1930s machine. Just because two guys working on very different projects just happened to be sitting next to each other when they worked on their respective contraptions.

To me the image of this one new component on this amazing piece of antiquity is a thing of subtle beauty. A clash of cultures, a contrast of design, and a community of exceptional craft all there in one simple photo. Sometimes a thousand words simply isn’t enough to describe it.

Anyways, I hope you guys are seeing something as amazing here as I am.

NYC Resistor was invited to exhibit our old Teletype Model 15 at Eyebeam’s MIXER event last March.  To make life interesting, we used a small Python program to grab tweets from Twitter matching the “eyebeam” keyword.  Watching a 50+ year old device once used to bang out the news of the day turn to printing the trivialities of the moment seems to echo the fate of professional journalists as the world’s attention span dwindles. To make things more interesting, we used a sentiment analysis algorithm to parse incoming tweets for positive or negative sentiment. The results were reflected on an old chart plotter. Positive sentiments moved the mark left. The middle of the paper represented neutral sentiment. Click the image for more photos and a video awaits after the break.

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I considered not writing this. I also considered posting a book review of one of the many books of Howard Ziinn’s that I’ve read. But ultimately, I think it’s right to call this guy a world class hacker of history. With his most famous work, A People’s History of the United States, he presented one of the most compelling alternative viewpoints on US history ever produced. His impact on high school and college students throughout the united states has been indelible. And, his passing earlier this week has left me truly saddened. And here’s why…
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So way back in the 2.4 Linux kernel days I operated a shell server. It was kind of like a “proto honeypot”. We set it up to portray a bunch of fake information about itself. We then released it into the wilds of IRC claiming it was a “machine we just owned here have a free account.” Then we monitored the systems use via ttysnoop applications and pulled copies of anything uploaded.

The result was we pulled about 4 gigs of exploit archives. And a bunch of logs of people trying to figure out why their x86 exploits weren’t running on the DEC alpha that was pretending to be the wopr.

Anyways, one of the neat side effects of my playing with the proc file system was finding a limit on the upper bounds of top. By setting up procfs to displays stats for 1048 processors I managed to get top to collapse after one iteration of showing cpu usage stats. Added a fun screenshot to the gallery.

Among the fun easy things you can do to tweak your kernel, upping your jiffy count to present 16 years of uptime, and customizing your HZ values are the most fun. I remember running HZ at 1024 back when the rest of the world was rocking it at 100 and slowing themselves down massively. Kernel tweaks are fun, relatively easy, and a great way to learn. Be fearless, be stupid, and be prepared to watch stuff explode catastrophically. But, don’t be afraid to slash and burn and start anew.

A friend and I had dinner in the little Hudson River town of Beacon NY last night, after a day hike on nearby South Beacon Mountain.  As luck would have it, Beacon is home to the Retro Arcade Museum. Despite the enticing name, we almost didn’t bother checking it out since it was fairly late, and from a distance the museum appeared to have closed down for the evening. What a mistake that would have been!  Inside was the finest collection of classic arcade games, pinball machines, console and handheld games I have ever seen (not that I’ve seen a lot of these, but it was still *very* impressive). The owner, Fred, gave us the grand tour, which includes a hilarious party room in the back dubbed “grandma’s kitchen”, outfitted with yellow formica everything, just like your nana’s — perfect for hosting hipster birthday parties. We didn’t have time to play the games but for ten bucks you can enter the matrix and play anything you want for a full hour. And these are not a bunch of PacMan machines you could find on eBay. Fred has obviously done a lot of homework, and legwork, and acquired a number of very fine examples of early games, including many electro-mechanical ones and first-of-their kinds. It is truly a museum. Of awesome.

Beacon is a 75 minute train ride from Grand Central, and the museum is a one mile walk from the train station. Aside from the museum, Beacon has a number of other cute shoppes and restaurants so this would make an excellent day trip for the whole family. I shall be back.

Will pictured.

I think of apple. I am reminded of the age of Woz, and how he literally ushered in the age of the PC with a near divine mastery of hardware design. Then I am reminded of Steve Jobs and how he ruined apple, stole from xerox, and ultimately produced a laptop that clearly resembled a neon toilet seat. And daily I am reminded of that tool, as I have to wade through a sea of ugly white and silver overly expensive Taiwanese crapple laptops on my way to pick up a Hot Cocoa and a rainbow cookie at the local Starbucks. But all that aside, I have a story to tell you all. It’s not a story of great design, miserable design, or anything you’d likely care about. It’s simply the story of my friend Will, and his little laptop that could.

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This is an image of actual Cray Super Computer Memory… each of those little rings, is one bit of visible read once memory.  Man has electrical engineering come a long way since then…  The opportunity to photograph this epic piece of electronic history was brought to me by my friend phar, who bought this on I think ebay.  Just thought I’d share the history.

After many months, my Kaypro 2 is finally up and running! Weighing in at around 30 lbs, with a 4 Mhz Z-80 processor, 64kb of RAM,  (upgraded!) dual 360kb floppy drives, and the rock-solid CP/M 2.2 operating system, this box is a lean, mean computing machine. NYCR-BBS, anyone?

Bill Pauluh's Restored Pilot Hi Fi Top View

While we at NYC Resistor pride ourselves on hacking the latest technology, we also have a passion for understanding that which came before – and the history on which our beloved technology is built.  You need to know where you came from, as it were.

My good friend William Pauluh of Hartford, CT is an avid vintage audio restoration hobbyist.  Bill takes care to replace worn passives with appropriate replacements, and salvages as much of the original hardware as possible.  Then he takes the time to refurbish the exterior and bring the gear to an almost-new look.  The audio quality of these vintage pieces must be heard to believe.  While the mainstream world is running headlong into compressed, poorly quantized audio – these relics from last century produce mellow, quality tones from primitive analog hardware. With the right patience and expertise, you too can grab an eBay relic and turn it into something new and wondrous for your audio pleasure.

“I’ve attached some photos showing the amp after I replaced capacitors and a few resistors, testing the unit, the amp & speakers in the cabinet, and the final assembly. I didn’t take any photos of the changer during my standard procedure of cleaning/lubing ( I really should, but my hands get so greasy/oily – I’m constantly washing them).

Pilot was a quality manufacturer in the early days (1950′s) of HI FI (along with Marantz, MacIntosh, Fisher, H.H. Scott, and Harmon Kardon).

Garrard was a quality manufacturer of turntables/record changers (based in England). Japanese price cutting in the 1970′s did them in.

This unit has the original Telefunken 12AX7′s (super low noise) and they test out very strong emission – plenty of life left!

I also received the original sales receipt for this Pilot HI FI (model PT-1015). It was purchased from a dealer in Canton, Ohio on 2/18/58 for the price of $169.50 + 5.09 tax for a total of $174.59 (adjusted for inflation in 2008 dollars, it’s around $1000.00).

I read on some link that Buddy Holly’s producer, Norman Petty, purchased 3 of these units back then (I beleive two were with the black cabinet and one in tan). I wonder if one of those went to Buddy Holly?

Interesting trivia to ponder.

Bill”

Check out more photos at Flickr!

(All material posted with permission of William Pauluh and copyright by same)