Sometimes you collect vintage gear without even realizing that it’s vintage gear. Take this LED signboard for example:
Standard retail gear, right? Nothing exciting from a vintage computer guy’s perspective. But hey.. what’s this on the side?
A floppy drive?! And an AT style keyboard connector?! Hmmm… okay, now I’m really curious. Let’s unscrew the back panel and see what’s going on here.
Gadzook! Quite the array of electronics in here! But look over the to left.. is that…
It is! It’s a 386! This signboard is driven by a very scaled down 386 PC! So what’s the story?
In the early 1990s, a company called JVF was offering animated signboards for retail use. According to a gentleman in the know some years back, the deal was you paid $5000 for the sign, and then had to pay JVF a subscription fee on an ongoing basis, with additional fees to change the message on the sign. I was told that you never actually owned the sign – you were just paying for the rights to host and use it, and JVF could take it back. The sign was capable of some pretty fancy animation. Check out this video by one owner:
The sign was ‘booted’ up with an MSDOS disk that contained the drivers for the LED board as well as JVF’s custom software to produce messages. The software was entirely proprietary and the end user could not make any changes without going through JVF first.
Sadly, (or perhaps, understandably) the business model did not work. Sometime in the late 1990s JVF met its demise, leaving signboard owners stranded and unable to change the signboard messages. This was especially problematic if you were a retail outfit using the sign to display things like prices. Over time, the signs were retired and dropped. I got mine from a client – I was curious about the PC inside and thought perhaps someone might one day find a way to edit the sign contents.
Turned out I was right, a group of determined individuals came up with their own sign programming utilities. I actually got my hands on a copy thanks to a guy who went by the handle Mr. Henderson, and managed to edit and use the sign for my business for a while. The new tools didn’t quite enable you to do the kind of fancy animation JVF did, but it at least made the thing usable. As I recall, you had to install the software on a PC running Windows 95 or less. You would then edit the files in the ‘slideshow’ utility and save them to a 720K bootable disk. As I mentioned, the disk was a standard MSDOS disk that called up the slideshow program via an AUTOEXEC.BAT file.
This is mine booting up:
I’m not sure what the purpose of the keyboard port was since DOS does not drive the LED directly. However in the previous video I notice it appears there were some utilities you could use directly on the signboard.
I’d love to figure out how the driver works – I don’t know if it’s possible but it’d be cool to find a way to redirect text and graphics output from the 386 PC inside to the LED directly and actually use it as an oddware vintage PC. I’m imagining my days playing Kings Quest on my father’s IBM Convertible, but in this case, writ large!
As mentioned previously, the TV Typewriter was a true do-it-yourself project. Literally all you needed to do to get going was order the plans. The plans listed the parts and included the artwork to make your own PCBs. Now, you didn’t have to go quite that far — Radio Electronics did offer some ‘legs up’. They arranged for SWTPC to manufacture the boards in limited quantity. Don Lancaster and his crew also built about 40 or so ‘surplus keyboards’ to be sold to hobbyists who didn’t want to make or hunt down their own.
Obviously I would have loved to have ‘original’ SWTPC-made boards to work with. Would have saved a lot of trouble. But in 2016, these are a little bit hard to come by. In fact, I’d never seen them for sale ever on eBay or anywhere else. And I assumed if I did come across them they’d be assembled already and ridiculously expensive. I didn’t even bother setting up a ‘followed search’ on ebay for them, so convinced I was that they’d never be available.
And that’s okay. The great thing about the TVT is, as I said, it’s entirely legit to make your own boards. And that’s the thing I think that separates this project from say, an Apple I replica. The latter will always be just that much more ‘replica’ because the original boards only came from Steve & Steve.
Anyway, regarding original SWTPC boards, I was wrong on all counts. I don’t know how, but I completely missed an auction on ebay that offered a complete board set, untouched. The price it went for? A heartbreaking $39.00USD. Ugh. The auction has long since passed but I did manage to save some photos before it went offline:
Now, I suppose this is a blessing in disguise – had I managed to steal those boards, I would have faced a moral crisis about trying to assemble them, since there can’t be that many unassembled TVT boards lying around out there. There was also the risk of assembly damage. Evidently the marketplace did not consider these to be incredibly valuable, but for me they would be irreplaceable. Wrecking them would be an offence punishable by flogging.
On the plus side, at least I now had a visual of what ‘original’ TVT boards looked like. Color, texture, size. From talking to Don, SWTPC’s involvement apparently was a while after the prototype debuted, so probably the prototype boards did not have the SWTPC logos. But otherwise looking at photos of the prototype and the alignment of screws, switches, etc, it’s clear the prototype boards basically were the same. Another useful bit of information – the silkscreening on the back looks more or less the same as the ‘parts placement’ templates in the plans:
That opens up the possibility that I could use toner transfer or some DIY silkscreening method to take the parts placement diagrams and transfer them to the backs of the PCBs I’m making.
The other interesting thing to note with these is they weren’t tinplated. That kind of had me wondering about their authenticity but after consulting with ‘experts’ it appears these ought to be legit — after all, this was quite early in SWTPC’s adventures in computing.
I’ve got my eBay followed searches better tuned now but I know I’ll never see these again. Oh well, another lesson in not making assumptions!
Don Lancaster’s TV Typewriter prototype, courtesy of the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, CA.
I’ve been an old computer collector for as long as I can remember. Even before they were old, they were unique – unique in look, unique in personality, unique in how they operated. In the early 1990s as it became clear the world was converging around the PC standard and computers were destined to become generic beige (later black) boxes; that and a little bit of nostalgia for my misspent youth prompted me to seek a few tokens of a disappearing age. In high school I remember the retirement of my school business office’s Commodore PETs, and asking if I might buy one. The PET had been the very first computer I had ever interacted with, as a Grade 1 student. It had been the computer I begged Santa for one Christmas (he responded with a VIC-20).
Anyway, back at the school, a teacher was piqued by my interest in those old Commodores, and was kind enough to secure one for me, free, fantastically enough. A SuperPET, with 8050 drive! A hobby (or more accurately: addiction) was born. I felt like that enthralled 6 year old again. Finally, a PET was mine!
For a good chunk of my early collecting days I had no idea what was really out there. Having been born in the mid-70s, I completely missed some of the earliest experimenting in home computing. My world was Atari, Commodore, IBM and so on.
That world was expanded considerably when the world wide web, and particularly Ebay came along. For the first time I found out that Commodore had produced something other than the PET, VIC-20, 64 and Amiga. I learned to my amazement of the TED series of machines, the C16 and Plus/4. The more I learned the more I wanted to learn. Collecting was made (relatively) easy by Ebay; you didn’t have to chance upon this stuff at a flea market or luck out at an estate sale. You just had to plug in the name of what you were looking for and, poof, there it was (or wasn’t)! It became a hobby in itself to learn about a new system and see if it was available for sale there.
But I digress.
Like I said, my world was the mainstream 8-bit stuff, like Commodore. Apple 1? What’s that? Mark-8? Is that a car? Altair? Never heard of her. I knew nothing of these and countless other efforts by early computing pioneers to break into the impenetrable fortress known as the Home.
Not that computers weren’t available if you really wanted one back then. They were just really expensive and of course the further back in time you go, the bigger a (ware)house you needed. In the early-to-mid 70s, most people had no practical use for a home computer. If they needed to do research, they picked up a book. If they needed entertainment, they hit the theatre. If they needed to type an essay, they had the trusty typewriter.
Some eager engineers had tried and failed (hard) to persuade people of the computer’s usefulness in the home – Honeywell with their hilarious Kitchen Computer springs to mind. Because you know, girls just wanna have fun (programming recipes in octal).
Between that apathy and the phenomenal cost of hardware, there seemed little chance for home computing. Enter Don Lancaster.
Cover of Radio Electronics September 1973 issue, featuring the TV Typewriter project (link: Matt Holley’s SWTPC.COM)
Don Lancaster was a talented engineer working for Goodyear Aerospace in the early 70s. He designed — not a computer, per se, but a thing he called a ‘TV Typewriter’. Don realized that one didn’t need to go out and purchase an ultra expensive video monitor to put text onscreen – in fact, most houses already had a monitor of sorts: their TV. The TV Typewriter would make use of what was already there and open the door to a flood of possibilities: “A super sales promoter! A calculator! A 32 register, 16 place serial computer!” Few of these would actually be realized, but the concept was critical in laying down the foundations of the 8 bit home computing revolution.
It didn’t have a CPU and could not be programmed. It couldn’t even allow you to do basic addition and subtraction like a calculator. Basically, it did exactly (and barely) what was advertised – it let you type stuff on your TV.
It was not a project for the faint of heart – although not nearly as expensive as a proper terminal of the day, it still cost some money and required some serious electronics assembly skills. Don’s prototype was a bargain basement as you got: a wood case covered in upholstery vinyl and a ‘surplus’ keyboard from a key-to-tape machine rejiggered for his purposes. The whole thing had a distinctly homespun feel. I soon realized, I had to have one!
But it was not to be. After years of searching I realized that with fewer than a couple hundred ‘kits’ sent out in total (Southwest Technical Products, an early computing pioneer, partnered with RE and offered a set of pre-fabbed boards the hobbyist could build a TVT from), many unsuccessfully built and likely tossed in the garbage (not to mentiom the passage of 40 years), there was little chance of my finding one online. The closest I ever got was a still pretty rare TV Typewriter II, which was a later design by Ed Colle that was a bit more packaged than the original. I’m really proud of that piece and look at it often, even though it no longer works correctly. (Update: it has been repaired!)
Digression again. So yeah, after concluding I would never likely come across an actual vintage ‘TV Typewriter’ in the wild, I realized, hey, I can do it myself! After all, that’s how it was done back in the day. And thus began my quest to create, from scratch, a recreation of the TV Typewriter. And since I’m recreating, why not make a replica of the original prototype? That would definitely attract some attention at vintage computing festivals!
I knew I would be able to find many of the correct vintage chips, some even period correct, with enough looking online. The boards could be recreated using copies of the artwork originally produced in the construction details booklet RE provided to readers for a fee. I fell in love with the whole idea the more I thought about this potential project – both as a means to acquire something that cannot be acquired, but also to go back in time, into the world of the early computing hobbyist and learn and invent just as they did. Even if I never got the thing to function (and that’s a strong probability; I’m a computer guy but I’m no engineer), at least I’d have it in my collection to show off. And anyway, lots of TVT builders in the day failed too. Failure is just as authentic as success!
The blog that follows will chronicle my efforts to build a ‘new’ TVT, a replica based on Don Lancaster’s original prototype. Get ready to giggle. This computer guy is about to get old-schooled.
