1987: Realistic Navajo TRC-434 CB Radio Base Station

Realistic Navajo TRC-434 CB Radio Base Station

This was my great-grandpa Hall's CB Radio base station. He used to use it to listen to hunters on the radio in his house74 back in the heyday of CB Radio. When he passed away, it sat in the house for nearly 15 years before I found it and put it in my Jeep. Now, at the time I was too poor to buy a proper CB radio comact enough for the Jeep, so instead I mounted this big thing on the passenger side of the center console, it worked well. I recently removed it and bought a proper CB unit that's much smaller. And now this enters my collection!

This thing is about the size of a big, thick textbook.

 This was made to sit on a table and be connected to a large outdoor mast antenna. Since the 50's truckers have used Citizens Band Radios installed in their trucks to communicate on the road, to talk about traffic and hidden police, and just to keep each other company. During the 70s, CB Radios became a popular way for people to keep in touch with family and communicate with other drivers and people in town. Much like what cell phones are used for today, a mother could have a base station in the house and "call" her child or husband on the CB to find out where they were, or a child could call if they needed help. With cell phones and pagers becoming cheaper and more popular by the late 80s and early 90s, the CB slowly faded away, and today they are almost exclusively used by truckers.

Large with many controls.

So all CB radios have about the same basic controls, a volume switch, channel selector, squelch, and most of the time an RF gain knob. There are 40 CB channels, with Channel 19 being the most common one used by truckers, and Channel 9 being reserved for emergencies. When no one is talking, there is a lot of loud static that is picked up by the radio. The squelch knob cuts off the speaker for weaker signals, you can adjust the knob for more or less static depending on where you are. Usually in the city, where there are a lot of radio signals and interference, the squelch has to be set very high, while in the country it can be set much lower where there isn't a lot of RF interference. RF gain increases the power used to broadcast and receive signals, turn it up all the way to reach as far as you can, or turn it lower to only receive close by signals, useful if there are a lot of people all talking at once.

This base station does a good job at picking up signals, and truckers can hear me well. I've used this to avoid traffic, and often the truckers are entertaining to listen to. But since it is getting old by electronic standards, I figured it would be a good idea to replace it.

As you go up in price, there are more and more features. LED displays, noise cancellation, special clarity controls, everything you can think of. Even today, there are CB enthusiasts who drop hundreds of dollars on CBs, personally I just like to have one for trips on the highway, I bought an extremely basic radio with no extras.

Since there are few people using CB radios anymore, the FCC doesn't actively enforce laws regarding CB radios, one of which is that you cannot modify a CB radio in any way, or increase the broadcast power past 4 watts. There are tutorials all over the internet that tell you how to do it anyway though. People have modified their radios to pick up and broadcast signals hundreds of miles away. You can read more on Wikipedia!

1958: Keystone K26 8mm Camera

Keystone K26 8mm Camera

I was at a flea market in Caddo Valley, Arkansas when my girlfriend Delaney found this old camera. This one is an 8mm camera similar to the Super 8 camera I reviewed some time back. This one is quite a bit older though, dating back to 1958. It is a black and white camera that uses different lenses to get different shots.

Multiple lenses

The lenses actually rotate and are removable with the top lens being the one used for recording There is "Normal", with the lens actually built into the camera and the removable piece just being a shade, "Telephoto" or basically a zoom lens, and "Wide" that gave you a wider shot, or basically zoomed out from normal. Originally you could only shoot black and white video unless you had a special filter, but in later years film was made that could capture in color without a filter.

Filter & f value controls

On the side is a wheel that controls the aperature for different conditions, from "Bright Sun" to "Dark Day" There is a small switch that places a filter in front of the lens, though I can't confirm what they do. There is an "A" and "N" setting, with one website suggesting it is an Amber filter and Normal filter.

Light meter

One unique thing about this camera is that it has a light meter that can guide you to the correct aperture settings, though my camera doesn't seem to work as well, even pointing it directly at the sun only makes the needle move about halfway up. Opening the light meter, it is basically a very old solar cell that generates a small electric current to move a magnet connected to the needle, personally I didn't know they had solar cell technology in the 50s but it was pretty cool!

A wind-up motor

On the side there is a crank that can be stored in the small lower hole. You might have seen older cameras where you crank the handle to actually move the film across the aperature, but this one is actually just to wind up the motor, there is a switch on the front you can see that you just push down to engage the motor. This way you have the proper speed. But winding up the motor doesn't last long, after about 7 seconds the motor starts to slow down, which would give you a fast forward motion on the projector film, so you would have to keep the motor wound up frequently and your shots short.

The viewfinder

This viewfinder helps you get your shots in frame. Each box represents each lens, the yellow box being the Normal lens, the red box being the Telephoto, or zoom, lens, and the entire viewfinder as the Wide shot lens. If you have ever used an old 35mm camera, you know these can be pretty inaccurate but it gives a general idea.

Film!

One cool thing about this camera, is that when I found it, it had film inside! I might have damaged it a little bit by opening, if you expose 8mm film to light before it's processed, you lose the picture forever. I have since stored the film in a sealed box to maybe get it processed later. This camera is very odd in the film it uses, at first I thought it was a 16mm movie camera from the physical size of the film, but it actually uses 16mm film that is flipped over to record double the frames of regular 8mm film. This kind of film was hard to find even during the 60s and 70s, and even harder to get processed.

As far as the film goes, I emailed a local shop that converts 8mm film to digital video, they suggested I send it to California, since the only places that can process 8mm film are in Los Angeles where there are a lot of filmmakers that use 8mm film and cameras today for special effects and art forms. From looking online, just to get the film processed, not even converted to digital, would be about $50 wish shipping, and that's for standard 8mm film. I don't know if they would even be able to do anything with this 16mm size. I'll do some searching, and if I ever decide to get it processed and converted, I'll post whatever is found on the film! Talk about a time capsule...

1983: Mattel Electronics Intellivision Computer Module Part 2

Everything plugged in and set up!

So first, it has been a while since my last blog, I had to focus on my studies and, well, I haven't got any new retro stuff lately!

Now I want to finish off my blog on the Intellivision ECS. It's actually the 50th anniversary of the BASIC computer language, invented in 1964 as a beginner's programming language that anyone could use. It was the primary software on almost all 80s computers, the most popular version was made by Microsoft. It slowly phased out of use with the introduction of more versatile programming languages, and better computers that didn't require the user to program anything. It's descendant still used today is Visual Basic.

This is all you get!

When you first start the Intellivision with the ECS, you get a choice to run the game cartridge, use the music keyboard, or run BASIC. If you click basic, the above picture is what you get. A blinking box, no Start menu, no launcher, no icons, no mouse, that's it! Just your keyboard and a blinking box for $450 (over $1000 in 2014!). And my god, look at the color! Black text on puke green background...who knows why they chose this color scheme.

The real power lied in writing and loading programs. The Intellivision loads and saves programs to cassette tapes, and you have to type in a command and go through an interesting process to load a program

Loading a program

Loading and saving a program, including the time it takes to line up the cassette tape in the right place, can take from 2-5 minutes, depending on the size of the program. Also, the ECS was actually a very limited and primitive version of BASIC since the ECS itself was the product of a frantic rush to appease a lawsuit. It didn't include as much as a full-blown home computer. By the way, I didn't misspell "Hello," 4 characters is all you have to name a program.

Displaying and running a program

By issuing commands, you can write, view, edit, and run programs Programs are written like this:

10 PRIN "HELLO"
20 PRIN "THIS IS A TEST"
30 PRIN "OF THE ECS"

The BASIC software reads the program in numerical order. You use multiples of ten when first writing the program so that it's easy to add lines later. Say you wanted to clear the screen before the program runs. You could add:

05 CLR

at the end, and it would read it first since 5 is less than 10.

I've done some experimenting with having a modern Windows 8 PC communicate with my old ECS. Obviously there was no networking or internet, so the only way they can communicate is by sending and receiving BASIC code. The videos I've made are of successfully sending a program written on the ECS to my PCS, and of a program generated by my PC being successfully recognized and loaded on the ECS. My goal is to be able to type out a program in a text file (because the ECS keyboard is hard to use, and the software is very primitive and tedious to edit programs), convert it into an audio file the ECS can understand, and load it into the ECS.

You can try writing and running BASIC programs yourself with emulators found on the internet today! It was an easy programming language to use, people could program a way to balance their checkbooks, do math homework, and do other simple tasks that PCs and phones have built in today.

Thanks for reading, hopefully I'll have something new for you soon!

1983: Mattel Electronics Intellivision Computer Module Part 1

Mattel Electronics Television Computer Module

Picture yourself in 1980, when you just bought an Intellivision game console for your child (or yourself), picking it over the Atari 2600. It's likely your decision was influenced by the advertising on the Intellivision box that you would be able to upgrade your Intellivision with a keyboard and make it your own home personal computer. Wow...imagine being able to program in BASIC...whatever that was...and type on your television screen...and buy an extra printer if you wanted to print it out....and....well that's about all you could do with home computers of the time. No internet, no sophisticated word processing software, no business software...much like what tablets were when they first came out, they were really just expensive toys that played games and let enthusiasts tinker. How could you justify spending hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on a complete computer, printer and tape drive, when you could do your typing on an inexpensive typewriter?? Not until the early 90s did home computers become powerful enough to be real working tools that truly made things easier. But you wanted to be cutting edge, you wanted to show off how you could type a paper and edit it and save it on an audio tape to come back to later, print revised copies effortlessly, and play some cool games, all made possible with the Keyboard Component promised within the year by Mattel Electronics!

Except it didn't quite play out like that.

By the promised 1981 release, the original Keyboard Component, which was far more advanced than any other computer system of the time, was experiencing some serious problems with reliability and it was prohibitively expensive to actually produce and sell. While Mattel Electronics tried to overcome the problems, fed up Intellivision owners who had bought the system expecting a Keyboard Component started complaining, and the Federal Trade Commission started investigating Mattel Electronics for fraud and false advertising. While the keyboard component was released in limited quantities, in 1982 the FTC fined Mattel Electronics $10,000 per day that the promised computer add-on was not released. To stop the fines, Mattel Electronics killed the original keyboard component and finally rushed out a project they had originally intended to be a an inexpensive educational device to teach kids how to program, and in January 1983, the Entertainment Computer Module, or ECS, was released.

What the hell is this thing called?

So, if you look at the pictures, you can see the box says Computer Module, the actual device says Computer Adapter, and the official name in the manual is the Entertainment Computer System. Most just call it the ECS...but talk about confusing branding...

Was this ECS everything Mattel Electronics promised? Not really. By the end of 1983, Mattel Electronics had fired almost everyone in the hardware department and shifted their focus toward software. Only a dozen ECS titiles were ever released, which were actually pretty good, but by this time, newer and better computers were released, among them the Coleco Adam, Timex Sinclair 1500, the Apple III Plus, and even the Apple Lisa were far more advanced and capable for the price. Mattel even released a standalone comptuer, the Mattel Aquarius, in the same year, but it was ridiculed as "The system for the 70's", and was killed only a few months after it was released.

What a mess of cables and boxes...

As you can see from the picture, the ECS just plugs into the side of the Intellivision through the game cartridge port. In order to use the ECS, you had to plug in an Intellivision game cartridge (or ECS cartridge) or else it wouldn't work. The ECS was actually designed to save data to an ordinary audio cassette recorder, but you had to buy 3 specific cables and your recorder had to have the proper plugs.

Aux was for a printer, also using a standard 3.5mm audio cable. Remote went to the tape player for a total of 3 wires for the tape player drive.

I happen to have an Aquarius computer tape drive, that I will cover in a later post, that worked with the ECS, and the cables are just 2 3.5mm audio jacks and one mini 2.5mm audio jack. Imagine having to plug a flash drive into 3 places with special cables...

Why two Siamese twin plugs for the keyboard...

A little door pops up to show the two input plugs and an audio balancing knob. They came out with games for the ECS that could use up to 4 players, the Intellivision's original 2 controllers plus 2 extra controllers that you could buy to plug into the ECS. In fact, unlike my Intellivision system, the Intellivision II (just a smaller, white version of my Intellivision) had removable controllers...you could actually plug in an Atari joystick or Sega Genesis controller into your controller to replace the odd disc-phone controllers of the Intellivision. I wonder if I could plug an Atari controller into the ECS and use it instead of my hard-wired Intellivision phone controllers...

If you wanted to use the included keyboard, it takes up both ports....it's the strangest thing, a Siamese twin plug. Plus there is the audio balancing knob...you see the ECS has it's own sound chip separate from the Intellivision...actually the first thing the ECS manual says to do is to type 10 lines of BASIC to match the volume of the Intellivision sound chip to the ECS sound chip....very bizarre. Though the Intellivoice module has a similar separate volume control for voices.

They also released a music keyboard for the ECS that you could use to play music in the built in synthesizer...that's right...no built-in tape drive, no built-in menus or options or controls, but by golly there is a music synthesizer! More about that and BASIC in Part 2...

A bit different from modern keyboards.

The keyboard has the basic QWERTY layout of modern computer keyboards, but you can see the shift keys, the control key, arrows, and return key are in completely different spots. Plus the alternate characters are all different, you can see there is no exclamation point or @ or & symbol among other oddities...but overall it's actually not that bad. It's kind of small, like an iPad keyboard size, but I can type normally on it. Besides, the ECS has no lowercase letters so the shift keys being in the wrong place don't throw me off too bad. What really gets me is there being no backspace, you have to use the arrow to move around and manually fix your error.

Advertising on the back of the ECS box.

It's a shame that at this point in history Mattel Electronics was hemorrhaging money and the top brass was trying to move away from hardware. The ECS, as flawed as it was, had the potential to have really good games and do more than what it was originally intended for. With our cell phones, tablets, laptops, and constant interaction with computers every day, it's hard to imagine a time when having a simple, primitive home computer made you cutting edge and really ahead of your time.

Or people just laughed at you for wasting money on a typewriter that couldn't type papers that you had to plug into your television...

Next, part 2 where I will make some videos and show some of the software capabilities of the ECS!

1967: General Electric Porta-Color M213CWD Color Television

General Electric Porta-Color M213CWD Color Television

Remember a few years ago when HD was the new thing? 720p 1080i and 1080p, loads of technical terms and marketing to get you to buy these new-fangled plasmas and LCDs, when most people were content with their old-fashioned tube televisions. But as the sets got cheaper, and people saw the crisp, clear picture next to a standard-definition TV, people started to buy only HD sets, no more big, heavy, bulky TVs. Now, it's a huge let-down to go to someone's house and find out they have a now relatively tiny, fuzzy, awful tube television.

Same kind of thing happened in the 60's, everyone who had a TV had a black and white set, ginormous box "console" units that were as big as coffee tables, sometimes including record players and radios. The screens were not much larger than 20". And you didn't just walk into a Walmart and swipe your credit card to get one of these, no this was like buying a car, a major purchase that many people financed. Owning more than one TV was like imagining owning two houses, ridiculous.

Then, they started coming out with COLOR! Unimaginably expensive for the average family, that changed with the first, smaller, "portable" televisions made by General Electric, back when it was known as "General Electric" and made TV's in America. I happen to now own one, thanks to a close friend who had it in her garage.

In 1966, General Electric unveailed their Porta-Color technology. Prior to that, color televisions used a technology developed by RCA known as Shadow Mask developed in 1950. Unfortunately, shadow-mask lost 85% of the picture brightness to create the color image and required enormous amounts of electricity. General Electric now had a major advantage, as this new technology required far less power. The original 11" set cost $250 in 1966 ($1,790 in 2013), and by 1968 there were many sets for $200-$300, leading to the popularization of color television in the United States. Porta-color TVs were marketed nearly unchanged to 1978. I'm pretty proud to own one of the first affordable color television sets. Not to mention, it is completely built in the USA. Only recently are companies starting to make TVs in the US again, for a long time there were no TV's made in the US.

But man, was technology primitive then! When I first turned it on, I thought the screen was broken because lights came on the knobs and controls but nothing happened with the picture. But then it slowly started to light up, this set takes a whole 45 seconds for the screen to light up, not to mention the 3 or 4 minutes it takes for the picture to look colored properly. And then I notice little amber lights inside the set. At first, I panicked thinking I was burning up the electronics inside, but, silly me, this thing doesn't have any transistors or computer chips. It's filled with VACUUM TUBES, that give off a lot of heat and an amber light.

Lots of controls? Wait till you see the back.

So, being 46 years old, you can expect things to be broken or flaky. Especially with these old analog knobs, they just don't work right They either control things erratically, or barely work at all. Luckily, most of the front knobs work at least enough to manage. So here's what they do. The two big knobs are actually each 2 knobs in 1. The inner knob changes channels, the top one controls VHF (2-13), and the bottom UHF (14-83). The outer rim when turned fine-tunes the channel to get a good picture. Unfortunately the VHF fine-tune only worked in one direction, so I ended up tuning it completely out. Had to open it up and fiddle with the mechanical doohicky to get it to work in the other direction too. The beauty of things without computer chips-you can easily fix them. OFF-VOL turns the power, and keeps turning to control volume. The speaker is flaky and probably on it's way out, it barely works, but its loud and clear if you turn it just right. Sound must not have been a priority back then, because it really sucks. BRIGHT controls brightness, that knob works. VERT was a control that was fairly common, sometimes the screen goes wild and looks like its moving below the bottom of the screen and coming out of the top in a continuous loop, fiddle with this to get the picture to be stable. COLOR controls color saturation, from black & white to over-colored. TINT goes from green people to purple people, somewhere in the middle is the right color. All these knobs have to be adjusted just right to get a clear picture. That is, if all the back controls are set right too.

All those round holes are controls...

Nothing was automatic or calibrated at the factory on these damn things... it took me 10 minutes to get a barely decent picture on this thing. It has 3 screw-knobs for red, green, and blue color control, balance all of them to get a proper picture. Then two knobs for blue and green brightness...which adjusted brightness for only those colors...again balance them to get a proper color picture...along with the other three...now that was hard. Then there is a horizontal picture control, that white knob. It was pretty flaky and loose feeling. Turn it too far in any direction and the picture pops and turns into a bright line in the middle of the screen, but basically it controls the how flat or tall the picture is. Another screw knob...well it seems to do the same thing but is somehow different...it's basically impossible to get the picture to fit inside the screen borders anyway. For example, the ticker you see on the bottom of ESPN or CNN would be cut off on the sides and bottom of the screen, and probably not be visible at all. Another knob is AGC, which I think is Automatic Gain Control, which amplifies the signal coming from the antenna. Analog channels aren't broadcasted anymore so it's not so important for the direct connection I have going into it (no cable on this thing). Another knob on the end controls contrast, it's pretty flaky, I can't seem to get it to be any less washed out. And finally there is a switch-button thing that is called degauss, if you've ever put a magnet near an old computer monitor or tube television you know the picture gets a weird purple green bubble on it that permanently distorts the picture unless you degauss it. Computer monitors commonly had this function...but late model tube TV's didn't...not sure why they quit putting them on TVs...

Not only did you need 2 different antennas, but you had to screw them in.

I needed an adapter to hook up my VCR, to hook up my cable box, to give me picture on this TV. It has one built in rabbit-ear antenna, you pull out two poles and and adjust, but that was only for VHF chanels. You needed a separate antenna shaped in a circle to get UHF channels. Though often back then there were only 3 or 4 channels that were all on the VHF band anyway. Picture was...well...not so great. One thing I noticed in comparing it to my 1976 Sony TV, is that there is no snow on this TV. No signal it's just a gray screen, if there's a snowy picture on the '76, there isn't on the '67. Very odd and interesting that this really old TV had a snow-free picture that even LCD's can't reproduce.

Comparing picture between my two old TV's. Notice the snow on the Sony and none on the top.

It's hard to tell from the picture but the color, contrast, and the picture in general is better on the Sony, from 1976. I have the same signal going to both TVs. The General Electric is very washed out and somewhat distorted. But the snow ruins it on the Sony...despite all the washing out out and distortion the picture I would say actually seems better on the General Electric. Even my big, new 2013 big screen TV has snow when I hook certain things up to it. It's very interesting. If I can get the contrast to work right I might actually get the picture to look really good.

Thanks for reading!

1979: Mattel Electronics Intellivision

Mattel Electronics Intellivision

So the Xbox One and Play Station 4 have just came out, promising insanely realistic gaming, lots of streaming media like Netflix and movies and music, and next-generation goodness. On the other side of the spectrum, are thousand-dollar desktop computers built for super gaming, that far surpass the Xbox One and PS4 in specs and ability. Oh, and they can actually do real work, unlike the Xbox One or PS4. Consoles have been like this forever, that is at least since the mid-80s. At one time, the line between computers and game consoles was blurred, they were one and the same, hooking up to your TV, and letting you play primitive games on cartridges, and some, with the proper attachments, let you do simple programming and word processing. One well known system from that time, that still has a cult following today, is the Mattel Electronics Intellivision.

Origin & How it Works:

I found this in a retro game shop in Malvern, Arkansas. It was in full working condition at a good deal, well except that on the right controller, some of the keypad buttons aren't working. Let's talk about the controllers for a moment...shall we?

What are these, telephones or video game controllers??

Wow. Quite different from modern controllers. The disk serves as the joystick, you can rock it in 16 directions (quite a few for the time, the Atari only supported 8 directions) and press it in the middle. There is a keypad, that you could cover with an overlay that would have animations and indicators for what all the buttons would do for that particular game. there are two buttons on either side, usually acting as fire buttons.

This would slide over the buttons so that you could tell what the buttons do.

Overall, its a very cumbersome controller to play with on some games, though with others it can be pretty useful. The right controller as I said has some buttons broken, which would be ok if I could just replace it, but that's not so easy, since the controllers are hard wired into the console! This wouldn't be a big deal for me, since I can open it up and unplug it, but since they are normally not replaceable there aren't many spares in existence. Plus they are hard to fix, since all they are on the inside is cheap plastic sheets sandwiched together. So I'll have to keep my eye out for spares and do my best to fix the controller I have.

A classic game, Astrosmash.

The Intellivision had one slot on the right side where you could insert games, and later add-ons for the console were developed that would plug into this slot. The games were really hard to insert, and they had to be inserted just so to be started correctly. For example, my particular copy of Astrosmash has to be inserted slightly crooked to start properly. All the cartridges made for the Intellivision look basically the same.

Check out that wood grain on brown plastic with gold accent! The pinnacle of class.

The Intellivision hooks into the TV traditionally with one cord, that plugs into a box with a switch, that hooks into the TV with screws and with an antenna or cable connection hooked into the box. Modern technology has replaced this cumbersome, unreliable, obsolete box with a tiny adapter that just converts the old coax game connection straight into the cable coax connector on the TV. Tune to channel 3 (or 4 if you flip a switch under the Intellivision) and you can play!

No HDMI here.

One thing the Intellivision had the Atari 2600 beat on was with graphics, they were far higher resolution and you could usually tell what the shapes on the screen represented. Still nothing close to modern consoles though. Sound was...definitely like Atari 2600. Primitive and sometimes hilarious. And then in 1982 they released the Intellivoice module!

Oh yeah, the Intellivoice module!

The Intellivoice had a special processor chip that enabled real voices to play during games. You shoved this box into the game cartridge slot, then shoved the game into the box. Computers in this time had a habit of having one expansion slot and just daisy-chaining add-ons. A particular TI home computer had so many add-ons you could grow it to be 8 or 9 feet long! It even had a convenient additional volume wheel just for voices. Only a very few games were released that had voices on them, they were expensive and not very popular, the Intellivoice was ultimately a flop. I have one Intellivoice game, Space Spartans. The voices enable you to get information through voice prompts rather than on screen displays or gauges, an innovative way to overcome graphic limitations that made on screen counters and gauges impossible to display. Unfortunately it didn't catch on and it's just an oddity now.

Imagine shoving a box into the side of an Xbox 360 to get better graphics...

There was a heavily advertised keyboard component for the intellivision that would have enabled word processing and turn the Intellivision into a home computer, but it was delayed and ultimately cancelled. Later on they did release a computer component, but it was not well received, only a few programs were made for it before it was cancelled. There was even an online game service, where you could plug your Intellivision into a compatible cable television service and download new games every month, the first downloadable game service of its kind.

So that's the Intellivision, I've uploaded some videos so you can see the graphics and gameplay, check the Space Spartans video to hear voices through the Intellivoice module!