Momma Don’t Take My Kodachrome Away!

Kodak’s first digital camera - film was in no danger in 1975! 

This beast took nearly half a minute to record a fuzzy black and white image onto an audio cassette tape.  The image could only be played back on a TV with a clunky Motorola computer hooked up to it.  Contrast that with the new Nikon 52C which is smaller than the cassette tape!

Note: Sadly, Kodachrome transparency film is REALLY gone as of June 2009. The first roll was sold in 1935. Not that I have used film in the last 8 years, but it's still sad in a lot of ways.

Bring on the Clones...

The IMSAI first arrived in December of 1975 and was considered to be compatible with the MITS Altair—the first clone? 

This device could be purchased for a little over $900, or as a kit for $599. The RAM maxed out at 64K and the CPU ran at 2.0 MHz. CP/M was the operating system and of course in ran Microsoft BASIC. It was used in the movie ‘War Games’ as the hacking tool. Some have resurrected this classic device as a ‘case mod’ that works as an IMSAI, but you can also put a modern PC motherboard inside.  IMSAI site.

The Paper Tape That Started An Empire

This seemingly simple paper punch tape contains the MITS Altair 8800 BASIC interpreter. 

Bill Gates and Paul Allen created this after learning of the Altair in a January 1975 article in Popular Electronics.

The program was created with an 8008 emulator that Allen wrote on a PDP-10 at Harvard. Having never even seen the Altair until they arrived at the MITS factory in New Mexico, the tape loaded and ran the first time!

Apollo by a thread -  err, a rope

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the first moon landing in July of 1969, we highlight some really strange tech.

In the early 1960’s, NASA & MIT had to come up with a way to store programs for the Apollo Command and Lunar module computers. The best tech of the day was something called “Core Rope Read Only Memory” - yeah, I missed that one too. It differs greatly from Core Magnetic RAM of the same period.   Each “program” had to be woven with up to 64 wires in each ferrite core to create the storage needed for navigation and landing routines. It has been dubbed LOL memory (not to be confused with LOL cats) because it was created by Little Old Ladies who would take months to “weave” a single program. One cubic foot of Rope Core could contain about 72K of programs - that even makes a single-sided single density 5.25” floppy look good!! The fixed memory was made from coincident-current ferrite cores woven into a rope with copper wires and sealed in plastic. Software components were encoded into a core according to the "pattern" of its weave. Each core functioned as a small transformer, with up to 64 wires connected to each core. If a wire passed through a particular core, a "1" would be read. If a particular wire bypassed the core, a "0" would be read. If you wanted to change the software contained in fixed memory, you had to rewire the sealed core to change the bits.