My HP 85645A 26.5 GHz tracker died while I was filming a video. To be fair, it never worked well and was shutting down randomly. But now it would not start up at all. Switched power supply pr...
2020-05-11 21:23:20 +0000 UTC View Post
I have a Twitter account, @curious_marc, but I almost never tweet nor even look at the account. But I made an exception.
2020-04-24 07:22:25 +0000 UTC View Post
I was finally able to pick up my latest auction buys, both related to future space electronics experiments. The first two are high power supplies, which we'd need to power up some of the upcoming g...
2020-04-23 05:44:31 +0000 UTC View Post
John, who is also a Patreon here, goes through a pile of big tubes with his monster tube tester.
2020-04-19 20:16:12 +0000 UTC View Post
Anyone got the mating part for this in their space parts bin? You can still buy them, but the price tag is something like $2,000 a piece and you need to order 10... This is for Mike's Apollo Comput...
2020-04-19 19:30:06 +0000 UTC View Post
Here is a short video of the first power up of Mike's AGC Buffer Unit. Mike explained that they abused an MECL logic gate to use it as an analog differential amplifier ("all logic circuits are made...
2020-04-19 19:28:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Mike got an Apollo Computer Buffer unit from one of the last RRauction. This box was part of the ground support equipment, and allowed launch control to upload launch related parameters that could ...
2020-04-19 19:18:01 +0000 UTC View Post
Ken Shirriff just wrote an article about his reverse engineeinrg of the AMD AM2901, a very popular bit-slice processor chip, which many machines used at the time:
I am continuing to abuse my Baudot TTY thanks to my new Blue-Box-of-Goodness interface. The print quality is very high, but boy, 45.5 Bauds is slow as molasses. This one took almost an hour to prin...
2020-04-10 21:21:05 +0000 UTC View Post
Quick update of the lab activity during the Covid-19 shelter in place. Stay safe and healthy.
2020-04-08 19:57:34 +0000 UTC View PostThe sound track of the Tetris game, as masterfully interpreted by my Mac SE/30 on a subtle background of disk drive rumble. I got many requests for it, so here it is.
2020-04-07 22:56:46 +0000 UTC View Post
This post is verboten to German speakers. The picture is the more or less original sign of the 1950's Blinkenlights joke I have in the basement. It's not German at all of course, it's colloquial En...
2020-03-31 03:33:34 +0000 UTC View Post
Couple more shirts from the last few episodes and an AvE inspired OSHA sticker . Still need to make one for the Soyuz clock...
I connected the HP 5061A Cesium frequency standard to the Soyuz space clock! It was a little more complicated than I expected. But I think I just made the most accurate vintage international atomic...
2020-03-22 08:07:26 +0000 UTC View Post
Looks at this nifty visitor from the 1950's! Came through my door courtesy of ePay, and packaged well enough so it was not in pieces. Which is amazing considering how incredibly heavy this is. It i...
2020-03-15 03:24:45 +0000 UTC View Post
Carl's been working on Marcel's real DSKY electro-luminescent panels (from this episode: https://youtu.be/B5j-8Jpaemc?t=679)...
2020-03-11 01:17:51 +0000 UTC View Post
Quick video about the amazing goodies that the team has brought to the lab recently. We had an impromptu gathering a few week-ends ago when Marcel said he would bring in the Cesium clock for the So...
2020-03-09 23:03:38 +0000 UTC View Post
We had a little bit too much excitement in the lab and the tripod fell over with the camera on it. It still appeared OK. I didn't realize it, but the internal and external sound went dead. Pretty o...
2020-03-09 22:26:51 +0000 UTC View PostKen scanned his raw schematics and provides some guided notes for the intrepid reverse engineer.
2020-03-07 03:52:54 +0000 UTC View Post
Mini behind-the-scenes video about the tyranny of keeping documentation under control, which is a huge amount of work. And don't worry about the hand, this was a while ago, it has fully recovered b...
2020-02-25 21:07:31 +0000 UTC View Post
Enthusiast level bonus footage. Mostly uncut footage from our discovering and playing with the clock after we first powered it up.
2020-02-18 09:31:53 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the original upload that got a copyright strike within 1 (Soviet Space Clock) second! The only difference is the Red Army Choir version of the Soviet anthem at the end. Big upgrade from the...
2020-02-18 05:07:07 +0000 UTC View PostThe Soyuz clock has the capability to close a relay contact at a set time. Actually, that's the one and only thing it can do to control the ship! The relay contact is accessible from the back conne...
2020-02-09 06:34:41 +0000 UTC View Post
Good old indestructible Soviet hardware! We checked everything methodically and powered it up super carefully. But we might as well have applied any approximate voltage and flipped the switch...
2020-02-09 06:13:33 +0000 UTC View Post
We are helping an international team of Paleobotanists to retrieve data from IBM 360-era 8" floppy diskettes. It contains a large amount of coded digital information about plant fossils from the Ca...
2020-02-03 02:52:12 +0000 UTC View Post
I didn't know, but when Antoine visited and I showed him the big tubes from the previous post, he immediately told us the glass seals on my tube probably contained Uranium because they looked green...
2020-02-02 03:13:33 +0000 UTC View Post
Ken has been looking at the inside of some pink Soviet chips. Not the very one from our clock, but the same ones he got from eBay - non military rated of course. He is so spooked about the Berylia ...
2020-02-01 20:19:12 +0000 UTC View Post
The ASR33 is finally done, along with two more from our guests that were equally sick. Boy these machines are finicky!
2020-01-31 07:12:08 +0000 UTC View Post
My friend Antoine (you'll get to meet him soon) just showed us a new method to recover chips from plastic packages without using nasty chemicals. Which is timely because I suspected some vintage ch...
2020-01-31 02:14:01 +0000 UTC View Post