So, where to begin?
Well first, I had to decide what I was going for. The TV Typewriter was a DIY project; as DIY as you wanted it to be. You could order pre-fabbed boards, but on most of the rest you were on your own. If you really wanted to go all the way, you could take the foil patterns from the construction booklet Radio Electronics offered and make your own boards from scratch. Thus, a TVT, unlike, say, a Commodore PET could literally take any physical form. It wouldn’t therefore be ‘inauthentic’ to just jury rig something together of my own design, as long as it conformed with what a hobbyist of the day would have done.
Trouble was, I really wanted what I created to resemble one of the units pictured in the original RE article. As a collector, the real motivation here was to have something I could not ever buy. There were two units featured in the article: the unit that appeared on the cover, and the prototype Don Lancaster originally built that was pictured in the body of the article. The cover unit had a more refined look, having a proper-looking keyboard, nice decals, etc. I have experience with modelling and part fabrication from my model railroading hobby and, having chosen to model a long defunct railway, am used to doing detective work and recreating things from photos. Plus, nobody seems to know where the cover unit is. It, unlike the prototype, seems to have disappeared into the mists of time. I’d be raising it from the grave, so to speak.
The problem with the cover unit is the keyboard — the underlying switches and electronics were a previous RE DIY project, so those could potentially be recreated. But the keycaps themselves were a limited offer deal that RE pointed readers to. Those are long gone. Perhaps I could get away with some generic grey keycaps, say from an IBM Selectric. But they wouldn’t be ‘correct’, and being that I wanted to create a replica, that would bother me. I wouldn’t have a clue how to have those keytops reproduced. I wouldn’t want to know what it would cost, either.
So then there’s the original prototype. Outwardly this would appear to be easier, from an external visual point of view. Everything is simple; the sides look to be just 1×6″ lumber, the case structure probably some 2×4″s, plywood and the like. The covering is still-available upholsterer’s vinyl. Switches are switches. The keyboard was of a type I’d never seen before, but I had hints that it was related to teletypes or something like that, with those awful cylindrical keys and what looked like square plastic surrounds. The lettering for them appeared to have been printed, cut out, and stuck on the surrounds. This was, I felt, was within my ability to recreate, if I couldn’t find what Don had actually used.
Of course, there’s the matter of the internals. And those are kind of important, because, after all, that’s what this project is all about. I’m fairly confident the internals of the cover display unit, if there were any, probably conformed to the kit design being offered in the article. But the prototype — as the word ‘prototype’ would imply, was a one-off, and that meant the boards inside could be entirely unique, as prototypes usually are. Now, I was fortunate that Don Lancaster is still kicking about and willing to answer questions from the public. But some details are lost to time. There are pictures of the assembled boards and ICs in the article, but the article doesn’t make clear whether these were from the prototype or ‘production’ pieces. The prototype unit is in the possession of the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, and they are willing to help me out for research purposes, but they can’t, for obvious reasons, go taking the unit apart to satisfy my curiosity. So it looks like I’m going to have to accept some guesswork there. I’d have to do it regardless of whether I chose the cover unit or prototype.
In the end, I’m choosing to replicate the prototype. One thing about it is the The-Hardware-Store-Guy-Gave-Me-A-Weird-Look exterior design. While the RE cover unit is more put-together and slick looking, I think reproducing the exterior details are probably beyond my abilities for now. The prototype just seems to have the right look for the early 1970s and is more easily within the realm of possibility for me to recreate. I can always try to acquire an extra set of ICs and parts to try building a cover unit replica down the road when I have a bit more experience. So prototype it is. Now to start assembling parts and get going!
