# Electronic things you remember



## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

A very new thing in those days. 300 baud!


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

KenOC said:


> A very new thing in those days. 300 baud!


And it went to 600, 1200, 2400, 14.4k, 28.8k, 33.6k, and 56k. Then I got an ISDN connection that was one of the fastest connections available to the common man before cable modems arrived. If memory serves, it was A 56k modem that first allowed my online gaming eg. Quake and the like.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

I thought I'd died and gone to heaven when this came out. I recently tried to play some old cassettes on my 3 portable cassette players, all fairly high end, Sony and Panasonic, only to find that 2 of them were absolutely dead.


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

I felt so cool when I got my first bag phone.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Some of you aging TRS-80 Model I owners, suffering in penury as I was, may have bought an Exatron Stringy Floppy. Far cheaper than the expansion interface and those vast 89K floppy drives! The "wafer" they used was like a little tiny 8-track tape, drawing a continuous loop of 1/16" tape from the inside of a full spool and wrapping it onto the outside. Like an 8-track, it was prone to jamming and self-destruction!

But compared with a flaky cassette drive, it was blindingly fast, for those days anyway. Ca 1980… One offering I remember fondly on the ESF was Bill Gates' personally written Basic Level III interpreter, a really premium product.


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## Art Rock (Nov 28, 2009)

My very first:


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## Jacck (Dec 24, 2017)




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## Guest (Aug 1, 2019)

I had this:


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## Strange Magic (Sep 14, 2015)

I wired my first (mono) Hi-Fi amplifier, an EICO kit. Then an EICO FM tuner. Then an EICO stereo amp when it first came out. And a better EICO tuner. The rich boys wired Dynaco kits, but we Proles stuck/were stuck with EICO kits. However, they had a fine reputation and worked very well for my first several Hi-Fi setups.


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## Dorsetmike (Sep 26, 2018)

My first Stereo, Goodmans Module 90, December 1974









(image linked from Google)


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

Strange Magic said:


> I wired my first (mono) Hi-Fi amplifier, an EICO kit. Then an EICO FM tuner. Then an EICO stereo amp when it first came out. And a better EICO tuner. The rich boys wired Dynaco kits, but we Proles stuck/were stuck with EICO kits. However, they had a fine reputation and worked very well for my first several Hi-Fi setups.


I wasn't a rich kid, but I built my preamp and amplifier Dynaco kits. The preamp was pretty complex, but worked immediately; what a rush! The amp wasn't nearly so difficult, but didn't work. Had to take it to a Dynaco-recommended service center.

Also, remember the Allied and Lafayette kits. Not that long ago, I thought I might like to make a Dynaco-like electronic kit. While there are shortwave radio kits to be had, there's nothing like the old audio kits anymore.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

DaveM said:


> I wasn't a rich kid, but I built my preamp and amplifier Dynaco kits. The preamp was pretty complex, but worked immediately; what a rush! The amp wasn't nearly so difficult, but didn't work. Had to take it to a Dynaco-recommended service center.
> 
> Also, remember the Allied and Lafayette kits. Not that long ago, I thought I might like to make a Dynaco-like electronic kit. While there are shortwave radio kits to be had, there's nothing like the old audio kits anymore.


The last kit I built was a 25" Heathkit color TV. That was a beast! It was just before ICs came into vogue, so there were hundreds and hundreds of parts. Took a long time to put together, but I used it for several years.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

I was a big fan of handheld gaming devices, particularly for hockey, baseball and tennis:


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## Manxfeeder (Oct 19, 2010)

KenOC said:


> The last kit I built was a 25" Heathkit color TV.


Wow. I forgot about Heathkits.


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## DaveM (Jun 29, 2015)

KenOC said:


> The last kit I built was a 25" Heathkit color TV. That was a beast! It was just before ICs came into vogue, so there were hundreds and hundreds of parts. Took a long time to put together, but I used it for several years.


My hat's off. I remember a review of that kit in a circa-early 80s magazine which showed a bit of the schematic. It was the most complex electronic kit I ever came across.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

DaveM said:


> My hat's off. I remember a review of that kit in a circa-early 80s magazine which showed a bit of the schematic. It was the most complex electronic kit I ever came across.


Yeah, the TV came as part of a DeVry Institute correspondence course on TV repair that I bought with leftover GI Bill benefits. Earlier kits in the course included a digital multimeter (using Nixie tubes!) and a 5" oscilloscope. Both were used in adjusting and aligning the TV.


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## Krummhorn (Feb 18, 2007)

One of the first computers we got to use at work in 1987 were IBM PC's with a 10Mb hard drive and 512 Kb Ram. 

The 2nd computer we got, in 1988, was another IBM with 20Mb hard drive. 

Our main testing equipment used 2-7½" floppy drives ... one for booting and the other for test files. It had a total of 11K Ram. It was "state of the art" for its day. Had two test heads - only one test head could be used at a time.


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## Merl (Jul 28, 2016)

God I hated Stylophones. They sounded like *****.


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## joen_cph (Jan 17, 2010)

Television tennis play. A friend of mine loved it.


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## Phil loves classical (Feb 8, 2017)

First one I played with. Some fond memories.


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## Larkenfield (Jun 5, 2017)

Loved the Kaypro computers and used one for several years. It was built like a Sherman tank. Loved the green screen that was very easy to read. My first computer and then I went to Apple and never turned back. But even back in the 1980s, there was malware and viruses, and I was shocked to find that out. When I bought my first computer, the choice was whether to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter or a computer, and a friend talked me into the computer for the writing I had to do, and I've always thanked her for that. I've had more income using one than being without it, so it's been a great tool for writing and editing.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

My first computer -- programmed with little magnetic strips. You could write your own programs and record them, too. It got me through college. I finished the Operations Research final, mostly on queueing theory, in fifteen minutes, having pre-programmed all those iterative equations (1974). The prof was startled!


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Larkenfield said:


> Loved the Kaypro computers and used one for several years. It was built like a Sherman tank. Loved the green screen that was very easy to read. My first computer and then I went to Apple and never turned back. But even back in the 1980s, there was malware and viruses, and I was shocked to find that out. When I bought my first computer, the choice was whether to buy an IBM Selectric typewriter or a computer, and a friend talked me into the computer for the writing I had to do, and I've always thanked her for that. I've had more income using one than being without it, so it's been a great tool for writing and editing.
> 
> View attachment 122079


I had a Compaq portable, a "luggable" like the Kaypro, when I was living in Hong Kong in 1983-84. It also had 512K RAM and two floppies. I lugged it in and out of China to do my consulting work. On exit, the Chinese immigration officials seemed not to know what to do with it. They demanded that it be powered up, but beyond that everything seemed a mystery. I'm sure they suspected there were many secrets stored somewhere in there!

Things are far different today.


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Who else remembers this useful program? "_Dancing Demon_ used Machine Language in BASIC DATA statements, a trick which Leo Christopherson pioneered on TRS-80 Model I with Android Nim and Dancing Demon and later Klendathu." It would run on a machine with only 4K of memory, playing the sound through the cassette recorder's speaker. My version played _Tiptoe through the Tulips_ in the best Tiny Tim style.


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