[Tech Time Traveller] He has a lot of voices in his head this week, and most of them are worried about his wife’s reaction to buying someone else’s trash. Although we do not blame him. He bought it from an estate sale and was billed as a TV typewriter. From the late 1970’s to the early 1980’s, the device looked completely like a home. It has a mess of hand-made components in a clean construction and a combination of messy wires.
[Tech] Videos do most of its testing and exploration things work and get tested. In terms of its age and construction, it has worked surprisingly well, although it has done little to get back to full function. In fact, he bought the device three years ago and is finally going to finish the project and assemble the video.
The terminal had a very strange Molex connector with a missing pin that matched the serial port of the SWTP 6800. A slight investigation revealed that the same estate sale also sold a 6800-based computer. The keyboard was actually something you could buy on a radio shack for a while. We wonder how many of them were used and how many just sat on the shelves until they dumped the garbage.
You have to think about the story behind this device and matching computer. It took a lot of skill to create something like that during the day. Today, you can easily do something like this using off-the-shelf stuff. You have to wonder if what you are creating today will be in the next generation version of YouTube in 2070. Probably not.
The TV typewriter was definitely one thing, introduced by a famous book [Don Lancaster]. When you look at all the necessary circuitry, it is amazing to think that you can now fit a complete computer inside something like this.