Just a quickie to share a rather nifty and unexpected experience I had while on vacation at Bethany Beach, DE last week.
On an early evening in the middle of the week I was sitting outside on the third floor deck of our beach house rental with my brother in law. Full darkness was probably 45 minutes away. He was doing e-mail on his laptop and I was fiddling with my iPhone. I put the phone on the table and sat back to just relax for a while when, looking up, I saw a particularly bright light moving across the sky in a northeasterly direction.
Something about the scene immediately struck me as as odd.
As I watched it pass, I noticed that it it was a single, unblinking, bright white light. Also, it left no contrails. The speed of its travel and the “smoothness” (somehow) of its motion stood out to me. And, even after passing overhead, I detected no engine sound.
It took about 10 seconds for me to realize that I was almost certainly watching the International Space Station pass overhead. I jumped online to an ISS tracker to see where the station was currently positioned, and — that confirmed it!
It was thrilling to happen into such a clear viewing of the most complex international scientific project in history passing right over my head. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. In all senses of the word, it was brilliant.
My dad would’ve gotten quite a thrill, had he been there to see it.
I am presently on vacation at the beach with the family. Bethany Beach, Delaware. Yesterday it was extremely windy and I flew my sort-of box kite that can only fly in high winds. And, then it occurred to me — why not tape my iPhone 4 to the kite?!
So I did.
I taped up all of the nooks and crannies of the device, and ended up having to reposition it a few times to allow the kite to actually fly. And I ran out of tape, so I ended up with it flopping about WILDLY, so I took a few stills from the video and assembled them in the following video. I want to mount it better (I have more tape now), but the wind was mild today. So, for now, this is all I’ve got. But it’s pretty interesting. Have a look.
If I end up with a strong wind later in the week, I’ll be sure to follow up with a proper video.
I post quite a few vintage computing photos here and over in my Flickr set, but this morning I snapped a vintage photo of a different sort. “Faux retro,” perhaps. I thought I’d share.
The early American iPad 2. I’m sure if the settlers had been so equipped, a quick jump over to WebMD would’ve staved off so much death at the hand of dysentery.
This past weekend we had some water issues in the basement (the unfinished, non-Byte Cellar part of the basement) tied to our A/C unit. In hunting down the problem, I had to displace many of the boxes in which my retro treasures came to me. And, after the issue was all patched up, I was forced to again evaluate my stance on saving these cardboard vessels of years past from which hatched so much vintage computing goodness.
Most retro computer collectors value the inclusion of the original box in any acquisition, and I’m no different. But, the problem is, once the hardware inside is removed and properly set up, the boxes simply section off valuable spaces of air in my basement. And I’ve decided I just can’t afford that in my tiny basement storage areas.
So, I let almost all of them go.
Is it with some sadness? Definitely. But, in a way, it feels good. After all, my computer room was already used as an example of grievous hoarding. Poor girl…
My father, James Claude Patterson Jr., died on April 26, 2010 — almost exactly one year ago. He was just shy of 83 years old.
Dad was a retired NASA engineer who worked for the government space agency for 35 years. (It was known as NACA when he started there.) He was an aeronautical engineer heavily focused on eliminating the induced drag that is wingtip vortex. He was involved in a number of high profile projects such as the X-15 experimental rocket plane, the supersonic transport (SST), the supercritical airfoil (on Dick Whitcomb’s team, my father was the member who repeatedly adjusted the physical shaping of the wind tunnel models’ auto body putty (mentioned in the previous link) during evenings at home in our garage, I well recall), the Whitcomb winglet, and the Wingtip Vortex Turbine.
After retiring from NASA, he continued his research for a number of years at NASA research firm ViGYAN, Inc.
Shortly before he died, he was invited back to NASA for a series of interviews about his life’s work. I wanted to share a bit of this. The video that follows is a short clip of my father discussing wingtip vortex. Have a look.
In 2005 my father wanted to share some of his basic thoughts about wingtip vortex flow with a few of his post-NASA contacts, and I helped put his handwritten copy and sketches together into a digital document. Those interested can have a look atThe Nature of the Wingtip Vortex Flow by James Claude Patterson.
Shortly after his death, I posted a Flickr photoset of images of and around him. Those interested can have a look.
I miss you, dad. Thanks for the science — and everything else.
UPDATE: NASA has, since, placed a nice profile of my father online, under their Langley Legacies historical project. It was very nice to discover this.
My first Apple was an Apple //c that I got in early 1984, right after it launched. It began my still-quite-saucy love affair with the Apple II and was just the first of many different Apple II systems I’d come to own over the years.
Now, I’ve moved through many different systems since then and, as many of those years were in my pre-professional days (read: no money) and also since I didn’t start actually collecting until around 2000, I rarely had more than one computer system at a time. I’d sell system x to basically fund system y.
One of the rare instances back in those days where I had more than one system was in 1987 when I was driving a sweet Atari 520ST setup. I’d recently sold a well-expanded Apple IIe system to jump up to the Atari and, so, in the closet went my boxes of Apple II disks while the Atari took center stage. But, after a while, I really missed playing those Apple II games. I didn’t want to drop the Atari, but I didn’t have the cash to grab an Apple II, either.
And that’s when I bought a Laser 128.
Video Technologies (or VTech) brought the Laser 128 to market in 1986. It was an Apple //c clone that was a follow-up to their Apple ][+ clone, the Laser 3000 (which I also owned, but only for a few days — that’s another story). It could be had for $395, which is far less than Apple was charging for the //c or IIe at the time.
The Laser 128 featured all of the integrated ports of the Apple //c, but it didn’t stop there. The machine also sported a parallel printer interface (Apple was serial-only), both digital and analog RGB out, as well as a IIe-style expansion slot on the side of the unit to which a 2-slot card cage could be attached (slots 4 and 7), allowing for much greater expansion flexibility than the Apple //c and many more built-in features than the Apple IIe. It’s was something of a “best of both worlds” situation.
I grabbed the Laser 128 and held my breath, expecting something of a compromised, rough ride. But what I experienced was nothing close to a compromise, but perhaps the best 8-bit Apple II experience I’d ever had. The machine ended up being 99.8% compatible with the //c, and I was so happy with it that I added the card cage and a Mouse Systems A+ optical mouse to the machine. In the card cage went a Mockingboard C soundcard and the Prometheus ProModem 1200A I’d been holding on to, a relic from my 1986 Apple IIe system (and my first modem).
I never encountered any program that would not run perfectly on the machine and I fully enjoyed the enhanced sound and telecommunications capabilities that the expansion box enabled. It was a wonderful system that really added a lot of fun to my day-to-day computing experience way back when.
The machine I owned was the first iteration of the Laser 128. It was something of an odd looking beast. A Millennium Flacon, of sorts. Some time later, VTech released a more stylish unit in the form of the Laser 128 EX and EX/2, the latter featuring a processor accelerator (3.6MHz vs 1.02MHz) that caused it to eventually push Apple to release the accelerated Apple //c+. The high school I attended bought a batch of Laser 128 EX units to fill a “writing lab,” and I am not exaggerating when I say that at least half of them gave up the magic smoke at some point — and I mean that literally. The engineering quality of those machines was highly suspect. I never had a lick of trouble with my original Laser 128, though — and it got some serious use.
A big part of the appeal of the machine was the whole “I’m getting away with something” feel that it delivered. But, according to the courts, VTech was not “getting away with” something; they reverse engineered the Apple II ROMs and legitimately licensed Applesoft BASIC from Microsoft — so they were immune from the Apple law suits that did come their way. The Laser 128 was the only 100% legal Apple clone ever sold.
I was using a fully expanded “Apple II,” but there’s no way I could have afforded an actual Apple at the time to serve as a secondary computer. It was great!
It would probably be silly for me to try and source a Laser 128 setup for my own Byte Cellar, owning an Apple IIgs, a IIe, and a //c as I do. But a part of me wants to. It was a great machine at the right time for me, and I imagine I’m not the only one who had a whole lot of fun with this non-Apple.
A short time later, VTech started selling low-end IBM PC clones in the Laser 128 form factor but, in time, backed out of the clone business entirely. The company is currently focused on electronic toys for kids. My daughter Rory’s first computer was a $75 VTech cartridge-based, battery-operated, kid-friendly unit that hooks to the living room TV with orders of magnitude more horsepower than even the Laser 128EX/2.
One of the problems (and hassles) of playing with certain vintage computers today is their dependence on floppy disk media.
While floppies manufactured way back when keep their bits together far longer than you might think — around 95% of my Apple II 5.25-inch floppies from the late ’80s are fully readable — time does take its toll. “New” double density 5.25- and 3.5-inch floppies are basically impossible to source, though random sacks of used floppies are pretty easy to find on eBay. But, even so and despite the charm of occasionally sliding a floppy into a drive, we’ve all long ago gotten used to launching apps from a fixed disk, making the floppy shuffle a bit of a hassle.
Happily, some nice solutions to the retro computing fan’s floppy disk problems have started emerging in the last few years, thanks to the numerous, easy to work with microcontroller kits that have become available. I’ve seen microcontroller-based floppy emulators that serve up disk images from flash storage arrive for many of the beloved platforms of old.
The most flexible of these I’ve seen is the SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator. This device works with any system utilizing a Shugart / IBM PC floppy interface and, as such, sports an impressive list of compatible systems, including:
Computers: Amiga, Atari ST and Falcon, Amstrad CPC464 and CPC6128, MSX2, IBM PC compatible, TI-99/4A, NEC PC88, Sharp X68000, Sam Coupe, ZX Spectrum, TRS-80, Dragon 32 and 64, ACT/Apricot, Perkin-Elmer Model 3030, Kaypro 4-84
Keyboards / Samplers: Ensoniq EPS and Mirage, Emax and Emax II, E-mu Emulator and Emulator II, Oberheim DPX1, Korg DSS-1, Yamaha Clavinova CVP-83S, Prophet 2000, Roland S-50
I ordered one from Lotharek in Poland (for around $110) and a few days later it arrived here in the states.
The SDCard HxC Floppy Emulator comes with an attached 2-line, backlit LCD display which is used, in conjunction with three control buttons, to browse the disk images on the inserted SD card and select titles for mounting. Disk selection on the system I bought the unit for, my Amiga 2000, is made even easier thanks to a downloadable Amiga disk image that loads a disk selection program on the Amiga, giving a much clearer view of the available images.
Despite the Amiga loader program, I still wanted to keep the unit’s LCD and control buttons in easy reach, so I used drill and Dremel to install the (detachable) LCD and a set of external buttons in my Amiga’s unused 5.25″ drive bay faceplate.
The results are pretty nice, I think.
I’ve had great fun with the newly enhanced system so far, but I’ve still got to site down and fully populate the SD card with hundreds of games and demos. I do wish the Amiga disk image loader program featured a PAL / NTSC softswitch, as my Fat Agnes can’t take a physical switch at J102. And next I definitely need a floppy emulator for my Apple IIs, several of which are happily in the works right now. (More on that when there’s more to tell.)
A tip of the hat goes to Andy Taylor and his Retro Computers blog. It was a post of his in late March that put the HxC 2001 on my radar.
For a few years now I’ve been sitting on two DVDs full of Apple promotional videos that someone put together and auctioned on eBay. Happily, most of the content was new to me.
The videos promote various Apple systems, primarily the Macintosh but also the Apple II, Apple III, Lisa and Newton MessagePad. They were put out in the ’80s and early ’90s, but I’m not sure of the intended audience for all of them. Years ago I saw the Newton video on a PBS station, but some of these may have been only internally distributed.
I finally got around to ripping these off the DVD and uploading them to YouTube for folks to see. I’d love to hear any info readers have to offer about these videos in the comments, and hope that folks enjoy them.
The first part of this video is an Apple User Group Connection piece made in 1987 that pretends to be a series of news and product clips from 10 years in the future (1997). It speculates on what the Apple of the future will look like. It’s definitely a tongue-in-cheek piece — cheesy and cute.
The second part of this video is a presentation entitled “An Introdution to Business Graphics” made in 1982 that strives to sell the Apple II and Apple III to the corporate world.
People in this video: John Sculley, Del Yocam, Steve Wozniak, Mike Spindler, Apple engineers
Apple Promo Videos, Ads of the ’80s
This video stars off with the “Power and Motion” video with a flowing water motif, naming members of the Macintosh line-up, from Macintosh Plus to Macintosh IIcx and the Macintosh Portable. It ends with then-CEO Jean-Louis Gassée having a sip of water himself. Cute. It’s is followed by a series of Apple Macintosh promotional sketches (“The Pitch”, “The War Room”, “Power Lunch”, “After Hours”) followed by three “The Power To Be Your Best” Apple IIgs ads.
I believe all of the content in this video is from the ’80s.
This is a three part video (due to YouTube length constraints) that makes up an Apple promotional piece, a full 36 minutes long, that promotes the Macintosh, the Apple II, and the company itself. It contains a portion of the Apple “Knowledge Navigator” video.
People in this video: Saiva Siddhanta monks, Javier Mariscal, John Sculley, Alan Kay, Jean-Michel Jarre, Steve Wozniak, Diane Ravitch, Alvin Toffler, Ray Bradbury
Presumably this video was released in the early ’90s.
Apple Video Recalling the Early Days
This is an Apple promotional walk down memory lane that recounts the creation of the company, the Apple I, and the Apple II with commentary from Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and others.
Former Commodore engineer Dave Haynie is auctioning off some extremely rare Commodore and Amiga prototypes to help in the fight against cancer.
From his “Haynie’s Garage” posts on eBay:
I have collected up a bunch of items from my days at Commodore. Most of these have been gathering dust in boxes in my cellar or garage. I decided to get rid of these, one way or another. These are largely of interest only to collectors.. most of the items do not function, many have no practical use anymore, but may be of some historical interest. I’m not really much of an intentional collector, I’ve probably held on to this stuff for too long already. All items sold as-is. At least 50% of all sales will go to my Susan G. Komen 3-Day for the Cure fundraiser. I raised about $2800 last year, and yeah, I walked 60 miles in 3 days! I’m not using eBay’s direct donation facility because that’s through another non-profit that takes 10% for themselves. This also lets me distribute any proceeds through other team members, if I do get a team together this year (every 3-Day walker has to raise at least $2300 or they don’t get to participate).
Dave Haynie joined Commodore in 1983 where he initially worked under Bil Herd on the TED systems (Plus/4, C16, etc.). He was later promoted to chief engineer of the low-end group and, after Commodore’s acquisition of Amiga, Haynie became the primary engineer on the Amiga 2000 and various related accelerator boards. In 1989 he began designing the Zorro III bus architecture and worked with several others to create the Amiga 3000. After that, his work on the “AA” or “AGA” 24-bit graphics architecture lead to the Amiga 4000 and 1200 computers.
Haynie left Commodore in 1994 when the company went bankrupt. Prior to his departure, Haynie had been working on the Advanced Amiga Architecture, an ambitious 64-bit graphics chipset built around a modified HP PA-RISC CPU that was to take the Amiga into the future.
The items Haynie has pulled out of his closet are gems of computing history and should fetch a hefty sum for this important cause.
(Thanks to Jeri Ellsworth, another highly talented engineer who created the C64-DTV and co-designed the C-One, for her Facebook post that alerted me to Haynie’s auctions.)
I was running through some of my YouTube videos over the past months and realized I hadn’t posted my build-out of the Monochron Pong clock. I was trying to do a series of mostly-daily videos for a while, to capture my various activities, and this was one of them. I’ve gotten away from that, sadly, but who knows — maybe I’ll pick that back up in a while.
The Monochron clock is a DIY clock kit that comes with a blank printed circuit board, an LCD display, and many components that must be soldered together. What you end up with is a pretty bad-asssed digital clock. Have a look.
There are custom firmware downloads that change it up to Space Invaders-style displays and the like. If I ever install one of those, I’ll post the update here.
There’s nothing like the feeling of “making” something like this yourself, I must say.
Happily, some nice solutions to the retro computing fan’s floppy disk problems have started emerging in the last few years, thanks to the numerous, easy to work with microcontroller kits that have become available. I’ve seen microcontroller-based floppy emulators that serve up disk images from flash storage arrive for many of the beloved platforms of old.
