A blog covering vintage gadgets, old computers, and retro electronics, from 1960s modems to Sinclair watches and microcassette recorders.
HN links it for retro hardware posts such as early digital cameras, toy engines, and electro-mechanical devices; comments give no explicit judgment.
When I was a kid, we couldn't really afford legos. But one year my brother got a big plastic bucket of Brix Blox[1], a lego clone (but not compatible). They were just as fun as Legos to us. They weren't a kit, just a bucket of bricks to build what you want. I think it might have come with a little pamphlet of suggested designs, but we made spaceships and weird little rocket-boat things and little stormtrooper-ish guys to ride them. It's kind of weird how I can picture those little guys in my mind so perfectly all these years later. Pretty sure I could build one right now exactly as we did then, if I had some brix blox.
Edit: this is the bucket we had: https://www.cutetoyus.com/product_detail.php?c=town%20toy%20brix%20and%20blox&p=17
[1] https://www.retrothing.com/2008/07/brix-blox---leg.html
I'm wading into an area I'm not expert, not to assert but to ask, I remember having an electro-mechanical object explained to me, I think it was a variant of this:
https://www.retrothing.com/2008/05/the-harmonium-a.html
I can roughly recall the mechanism by which it worked, and was told that this was an analog for how the Fourier transformation worked, and I vaguely remember going through one on paper. The spiral of the cochlear seems an analog of how the harmonium works. Does the earlier poster have a point with regard to the cochlear as a physical object performing a Fourier transform (though perhaps not a fast one)?
It wasn't used for the wire frames of the Death Star/trench run briefing. Those were digitally generated on a PDP-11.
I'm like 75ish percent sure the Scanimate was used to generate the orbits the Death Star's targeting computer was showing as they were showing the moon coming out from behind the planet.
oh.. spoilers... for Star Wars....
https://www.retrothing.com/2008/04/star-wars-prehi.html
Adorable as a cool future-retro gadget. OK, probably not optimal for pedagogical purposes!
I once read about a sewing machine had a gameboy interface (don't remember if it was a hack or OEM). These things are so tough and ubiquitous, it is surprising that they aren't used as cheap interfaces to machinery.
Check it out: http://www.retrothing.com/2006/04/izek_sewing_mac.html
Use emacs as backstore/virtual gpu for displaying/generating doom ai 3d graphics [1] (vs. 2d mechanical tv[2])
Test out various ai approaches via battle of different ai control models of doom player(s).
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[1] : http://newatlas.com/technology/ai-powered-gaming-engine-gamengen-doom/
[2] : http://www.retrothing.com/2008/06/build-your-own.html
And, if they did hang out at Radio Shack, they would have come across the venerable Minimus-7 - one of the first examples ever of a high-performing micro speaker with a sealed-enclosure design, that still stands up to the test of time.
http://www.retrothing.com/2011/06/minimus-speaker.html