Hmm….

feast your ocular orbs on this cross section of a miniature Nuvistor vacuum tube.

Now I need to do something with mine!

The Zenith "space Command" family of remotes are completely mechanical yet totally wireless remote controls that were popular in the 1960's. The remotes came with between two to four buttons, depending on the trim model of your TV set. This remote contains four buttons and can operate six different functions.

These remotes are heavily patented and gave Zenith for many years the advantage over competitors wanting to sell a wireless remote.

The inside of a Space Command contains spring loaded hammers and up to four precision aluminum rods that when struck emit a peaked tone in the ultrasonic frequency range. Through harmonics it's often heard as a "clink".

A thing arrived today.

May I introduce you to this abomanation

Not my finest work, but. It’ll get the job done nicely.
Cant get the old Amp-Lok connectors anymore and mine are shattering. So DB15 and DE9 connectors it is!

We’re in the process of freeing the DATA trapped on these esoteric carriers. Would you support and help us store and carefully recover this data with a membership or sponsorship? icm.museum

#software #preservation #esoteric #tapes #disks #media #vintagecomputing #retrocomputing

colorful circuit board in a layout program. each layer is a different color. it's complicated!

this is the largest circuit board i've ever completely reverse engineered. 8 layers, larger than a sheet of paper, 1000s of nets, over 1000 parts. 🧵

metal can oscillator marked HOORAY VX8111 34.500MHz . 9 1 4 1

Hooray! it's 34.5MHz!

a teletubbies character is standing in a grassy field with his arms outstretched ALT: a teletubbies character is standing in a grassy field with his arms outstretched

Wait…. Something has occurred. I feel it. Wait I hear boss music…. Oh no…. It cant be! IM OLDER 😱
Aaaaaaaaaaaa I cant be 26 yet

finally painted the dumbest 3D sculpt i’ve made to date #art

a tiny little 3D printed “ham radio” in the palm of my hand (it looks like a ham with an antenna and radio face)

another angle of my HAM RADIO

yet another angle of my ham radio

the front radio face of my han radio. you can see the tiny details are quite messily painted and need to be adjusted larger in the sculpt

some photos so you can really see how messy my tiny bits are #art

What do you do if you own one of the original green-eyed Microsoft mice but you don't have the special Microsoft ISA card it needs to interface with a computer?
Well if you have deep pockets you hunt down and buy one, but you can also convert the more common InPort Bus Mouse card to work as well!

“Will there be a video tomorrow?”

Usagi's video today really hit close to home with the IV/90 I'm still trying to understand.

A second Maxell battery that has been sitting on my bench for years has now started to push the resin-capped end off.

Thanks for all the support in 2025! 👍🏼

All fixed! Now I can (hopefully?????) get my years-late videophone video done. >_>

I was going to be a bit more celebratory today with getting the last video of the year finished and stuff, then it got dropped on me pretty hard this morning that over the weekend we lost an icon in the world of tech reporting.

😔

obits.goldsteinsfuneral.com/stewart-chei...

Every year I'm guilty of buying my own Christmas presents, because nobody else knew of or where to find some obscure IBM retail computer from the early 90's to which seemingly does not exist on the internet until now.

IBM 4612 SurePoint Mobile computer. Yes, it's just a "Penabled" 486 DOS tablet.

Tape a 4x6 card to the side and put the label on :-)

Is this acceptable for #retrocomputing #vintagecomputing in 2026?