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 Metal-encased vacuum tubes were such a big
deal when they arrived on the scene in the mid 1930s that two successive issues
of Radio-Craft devoted the majority of print space to them. Metal tubes,
as admitted by editor and author Hugo Gernsback, did not perform as well electrically
as glass tubes yet, but that was attributed to the infancy of the technology. Overwhelming
positives, including ruggedness, lower cost of production, longevity and other aspects
would ensure that metal tubes "are here to stay." They never did even come close
to replacing glass tubes. One of the most interesting statements in the article
has nothing to do with metal tubes, but Mr. Gernsback's understanding...
 "At MWC26 in Barcelona, SpaceX introduced
a new phase of its
direct-to-device
(D2D) satellite strategy, renaming the offering Starlink Mobile and outlining
plans to align it more closely with terrestrial 5G networks. The service will run
on the company's second-generation low Earth orbit satellites and is positioned
as complementary to ground-based infrastructure. Michael Nicolls, SVP at SpaceX,
said in a presentation at the event that the upgraded satellites represent a significant
technical step beyond the LTE-compatible messaging, voice, and video services supported
by the first-generation constellation - broadband capabilities to unmodified cell
phones..."
 Here is a brief synopsis on the main difference
between
glass and metal vacuum tubes - the metal case tubes generally
exhibit higher interelectrode capacitances. Unless successfully addressed, that
limits usefulness in high frequency circuits. One of the major advantageous features
of metal tubes is the built-in EMI/RFI shielding both for keeping desirable fields
inside the tubes and keeping undesirable fields from entering...
 This article, in addition to reporting on
early
push-push power amplifier configurations, demonstrates what a
mess AC and DC power distribution systems were in the early days of electric service.
Standardization and regulation was at a minimum, and the plethora of potential hazards
to life and property makes you wonder how more people were not killed, maimed, or
had houses and businesses burned down. You hear a lot about medical issues that
came from lead-based paint on window sills, but the electrical wiring and connected
equipment were a mess. Back to the push-push amplifiers, though. According to the
author, the primary difference from the more familiar push-pull amplifier is that
the configuration removes bias from...
 Crane Aerospace & Electronics' products
and services are organized into six integrated solutions: Cabin Systems, Electrical
Power Solutions, Fluid Management Solutions, Landing Systems, Microwave Solutions,
and Sensing Components & Systems. Our Microwave Solution designs and manufactures
high-performance
RF, IF and millimeter-wave components, subsystems and systems for commercial
aviation, defense, and space including linear & log amplifiers, fixed &
variable attenuators, circulators & isolators, power combiners & dividers,
couplers, mixers, switches & matrices, oscillators & synthesizers.
 Teenage technophiles Carl Anderson and Jerry
Bishop were up to their old tricks again in this "The
Tele-Tattletale" episode of John Frye's monthly adventure in Popular Electronics
magazine. The boys were bitten by the Space Race bug that was in full swing at the
time (1958). Jerry cleverly built himself a telemetering device to mimic some of
the functions being employed on missiles and, soon to be, manned spacecraft (1961).
His setup involved a lot of different technologies and homemade electromechanical
sensors and electronic paraphernalia - all stuff that can be bought for peanuts
on Amazon for use with Arduino configurations. At first I thought maybe Mr. Frye
had slipped in his writing, because in the beginning Jerry had the remote sensor
unit inside a metal freezer...
 In 1936, a high school graduate could expect
to earn about $15 per week, or about 38¢ per hour (40-hour week), in the
nascent
radio business. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' Inflation
Calculator, that is the equivalent of around $348 per week in 2026, which is not
much to live on these days. Today, many McDonalds burger flippers are being paid
$15 per hour ($600/40-hour week). That equates to a little over $26 per week in
1936 - nearly twice as much as an electronics technician who likely had military
and/or technical school training. This 1936 Radio-Craft magazine article discusses
the benefits of formal education in regard to potential earnings...
 "NTT DOCOMO, a Japan-based mobile network
operator providing telecommunications services including mobile voice, data, 5G,
and digital solutions for consumers and enterprises and Keio University Haptics
Research Center have conducted a demonstration of high-precision
remote robot operation over commercial 5G. By combining Configured Grant, a
low-latency network slicing technology, with Keio's Real Haptics® technology, force
feedback and tactile sensations were transmitted stably. The demonstration marks
the first instance of Configured Grant being used to enable practical robot teleoperation
over commercial 5G..."
 Radio-Craft magazine ran a series
of feature articles on "Men Who Made Radio." The January 1930 edition honored Canadian
engineer
Reginald A. Fessenden, who is credited for making the first
wireless voice transmission. Mr. Fessended worked with both Thomas Edison and
George Westinghouse, eventually inventing the rectifying electrolytic detector,
which was the successor of the coherer and the precursor of the crystal and the
tube detectors. His interest in communications extended beyond radio to include
sonic devices like sonar, a field in which he also gained significant renown...
 What was considered in 1937 to be a breakthrough
feat for a full-size airplane is today accomplished regularly in model airplanes.
What took hundreds of pounds of generators, radio gear, sensors, and actuators to
perform the first-ever
fully automatic landing is now done with a few ounces of microminiaturized
GPS receiver, processor, MEMS sensors, servos, and a LiPo battery. The HobbyZone
Sportsman S+RTF (see video at bottom) is an example. Most modern commercial aircraft
are capable of landing themselves in an emergency situation. Just today there was
a news report of an American Airlines pilot that died in flight and the copilot
took over to land the airplane...
 Conceptual dilemmas in electronics (and
other fields) often arise from foundational misunderstandings that can be resolved
through rigorous analysis. This Popular Electronics magazine article addresses
three primary paradoxes that frequently confuse beginners. First, the "plus-and-minus"
debate regarding current direction is clarified as a semantic convention: while
electrons physically flow from negative to positive, the historical definition of
current often assumes the opposite direction, provided one remains consistent. Second,
the capacitor-charging paradox, which seems to contradict the near-light-speed transmission...
 Here are the schematics, chassis layout,
and service info for the
Howard Explorer Model W Deluxe 19 Tube All-Wave Superheterodyne
radio. The Radio Service Data Sheets that were published in Radio-Craft
magazine usually seem to have more information included than those published in
other magazines, at least in the same era (1940-ish). It might have to do with how
much material is provided by the manufacturer rather than a decision by the magazine
editors. Believe it or not, there are still people searching for such data...
 "SpaceX satellite policy lead Udrivolf Pica
told participants in the International Telecommunication Union Space Connect webcast
about the next-generation Starlink direct-to-device (D2D) cellular service for smartphones.
The revelation of the new service follows SpaceX's October 2025 U.S. trademark filing
for "STARLINK MOBILE" and comes as Elon Musk has recently hinted at Starlink mobile
ambitions. 'We are aiming at peak speeds of
150 Mbps per user,' Pica said, adding, 'So something incredible if you think
about the link budgets from space to the mobile phone..."
 On a fairly regular occasion someone will
write to one of the QST magazine columnists or post on a forum asking about information
on a particular antenna configuration he recalled seeing printed many moons ago,
but can no longer find anything on it. Fortunately, the columnists are guys who
have been in the Ham game for a many decades and not only remember what the writer
references, but knows where to dig out the original info. Even with the plethora
of resources available on the Web, some things still cannot be found because nobody
yet has posted it. That is one of my prime...
 Hiram Percy Maxim is well-known by amateur
radio operators as the founder of the American Radio Relay League (ARRL). He died
in 1936 and was buried at Rose Hill Cemetery in Hagerstown, Maryland. A few years
ago while visiting relatives in Hagerstown, I went to the cemetery, took some photos,
got the exact GPS coordinates, and posted a short article on it (see
Hiram Percy Maxim's Gravesite in Hagerstown, Maryland). If
not for my documentation, there would be no way to know that the large grave marker
shown in this 1940 QST magazine article does not belong to the esteemed
Mr. Maxim, but to the matron of his wife's family...
 Here are a couple
high tech comics for your enjoyment from the pages of the July
1961 edition of Electronics World magazine. I'm guessing the joke in the
page 72 comic is that unknown parts were/are generically referred to as "Brand
X," so hopefully that would bring in customers who couldn't identify components
(which the repairman probably could). It could also be an unintended warning that
if "Brand X" (knockoff part) is sold there, then there is a good chance inferior
parts will be used in the repair. The page 94 comic is yet another play
on the huge popularity of home hi-fidelity (hi-fi) sound systems of the day. Amplifiers
still used vacuum tubes so building speaker driver circuits that could handle hundreds
of watts was easy to do...
 Fifth in the "Men Who Have Made Radio" series,
Heinrich Hertz is honored here for giving mankind what author Hugo Gernsback appropriately
termed "a sixth sense." Having earned his doctorate with a thesis on "the distribution
of electricity over the surface of moving conductors," Hertz proved through his
experiments the existence of electromagnetic waves - the aforementioned sixth sense.
During his short 37 years on Earth,
Heinrich Hertz accomplished an impressive amount of fundamental
research and discovery. He was remembered fondly as a kind man who placed advancing
the frontiers of science ahead of fighting for credit...
 Werbel Microwave began as a consulting firm,
specializing in RF components design, with the ability to rapidly spin low volume
prototypes. The
WMRD09-7.2-S is a 9-way resistive splitter that covers from DC to 7.2 GHz
with ultra-wide bandwidth. This unique design accomplishes extremely flat frequency
response in a small radial package. Our unique design approach provides higher than
expected isolation between outputs at far ports than would be achieved in a typical
star topology. It has applications in markets such as CATV, T&M, and military
radio...
 While watching the Avengers: Age of
Ultron movie, at some point when one of the computer voices was speaking, a
memory of the "This
Is DigiTalker" voice suddenly came to mind. Back in the mid-1980s while working
at Westinghouse in Annapolis, Maryland, a couple of the engineers brought a DigiTalker
prototype experimentation board into the super-classified area where I worked. According
to National Semiconductor's datasheet, it was introduced sometime around 1980. The
programmable digital voice IC was a big deal in that unlike other devices that had
a fixed set of...
 Innovative Power Products has been designing
and manufacturing RF and Microwave passive components since 2005. We use the latest
design tools available to build our baluns, 90-degree couplers, directional couplers,
combiners/dividers, single-ended transformers, resistors, terminations, and custom
products. Applications in military, medical, industrial, and commercial markets
are serviced around the world. Products listed on the website link to detailed mechanical
drawings, electrical specifications, and performance data. If you cannot find a
product that meets your requirements on our website, contact us to speak with one
of our experienced design engineers about your project.
 Some things never change - at least at the
fundamentals level.
Electric circuits is one of those things. I don't remember when I first became
interested in electrical apperati, but it must have been due to a natural affinity
to the science because nobody in my family or my circle of friends expressed any
interest. I was the odd man (or boy) out on my street, because while all the other
kids were playing baseball, basketball, and football, I was sticking forks in electric
sockets and disassembling flashlights, battery-powered toys, and building Erector
Set contraptions using the included electric motor. That's not to say I ever got
really good at it, but significantly better than I ever got at playing sports...
 You would be forgiven in this era of ubiquitous
cellphone usage for thinking maybe
Citizen Band (CB) radios are only used these days by techno-throwbacks
like myself, but the fact is many truckers still use them for convenience as well
as to avoid having all their communications intercepted, monitored, and recorded
by government agencies. It can be a deceiving sense of privacy though, because police
officers often monitor CB radio transmissions while in patrol cars, and even solicit
the assistance of other CBers in identifying and apprehending suspected transgressors
- an advantage of public, unencrypted conversation afforded law enforcement which
is not available with cellphones. Also, CB transmission, even though usually regarded
as "hearsay" in legal venues, has many times been admitted as evidence in cases
where "present sense impression," "excited utterance," or some other special...
 I have experienced the problem with low
precision AI calculations; however, it will use high precision if specifically instructed
to do so. "AI has driven an explosion of
new number
formats - the ways in which numbers are represented digitally. Engineers are
looking at every possible way to save computation time and energy, including shortening
the number of bits used to represent data. But what works for AI doesn't necessarily
work for scientific computing, be it for computational physics, biology, fluid dynamics,
or engineering simulations. IEEE Spectrum spoke with Laslo Hunhold..."
 This week's
Science & Engineering Crossword Puzzle, as is the case with all RF Cafe
crossword puzzles, has only words and clues related to science and engineering.
Each week for two decades I have created a new technology-themed crossword puzzle
using only words (1,000s of them) from my custom-created lexicon related to engineering,
science, mathematics, chemistry, physics, astronomy, etc. You will never find among
the words names of politicians, mountain ranges, exotic foods or plants, movie stars,
or anything of the sort. You might, however, find someone or something in the otherwise
excluded list directly related to this puzzle's technology theme, such as Hedy Lamarr
or the Bikini Atoll, respectively. Avid cruciverbalists amongst us: the gauntlet
has been thrown down.
 "And there is nothing new under the sun."
- Ecclesiastes 1:9, NKJV (did you know that is the origin
of the saying?). This 1930 editorial by Radio-Craft editor Hugo
Gernsback describes a coordinated scam perpetrated by
radio manufacturers to compel consumers to buy new sets rather
than have their existing sets repaired. In short, retail prices were inflated to
accommodate a built-in 'trade-in' allowance that far exceeded the repair cost or
used radio cost. Radio service shops were getting the short shrift because many
people who might have otherwise elected to have repairs made would instead trade
in the old set for a new one...
|
 • Manufacturing
Expands Amid Surging Prices
• 6G
Spectrum Sharing Shows Promise
• FCC Expands
Unlicensed Use of 6 GHz Band
• Active
Smartphone Installed Base up 2% in 2025
• FDA Clarifies
Wearable Device Rules
• Revisiting the
1996 Telecommunications Act
 The
RF Cafe Homepage Archive
is a comprehensive collection of every item appearing daily on this website since
2008 - and many from earlier years. Many thousands of pages of unique content have
been added since then.
 Ode on a Power Supply? Well, maybe not really
an ode, but this poem entitled, "Power Supply," written by Eileen V. Corridan,
appeared in the September 1942 edition of the ARRL's QST magazine. It is
really quite entertaining and instructive! It applies to the original tube-based
circuit as well as to modern solid state versions. I somehow get the feeling that
this poem will now be republished in many places...
 On a whim, I did a search for the earliest
appearance of Nikola Tesla's name in U.S. newspapers included in the NewspaperArchive.com
database. This story from Mr. George Grantham Bain appeared in multiple newspapers
within a few days of this March 5, 1896 edition of The Warren Times in
Warren, Pennsylvania, which coincidentally is only a few miles from me here in Erie.
The article reports on the role that Tesla's high voltage generators played in the
development of x-ray images on fluorescent displays and on film (which Tesla termed
"cathode photography"). It mentions how the term "cathode" is relatively new to
the general public even though it had been around since 1832 when Michael Faraday
introduced it in his work. Wilhelm Röentgen made the world's first x-ray image...
 World Radio Laboratories (WRL) was a major
manufacturer of amateur radio equipment in the middle of the last century. They
were famous for high power transmitters like the Globe King models, which looked
exactly like the big, black, rack-based units seen in older movies with Ham radio
cameos. It took a couple chassis filled with big glowing vacuum tubes to pump out
a kilowatt of power. Today's semiconductor-based transmitters do the job in a small
fraction of the volume, with higher quality and higher reliability and with usually
no periodic maintenance required. The savings in your electric bill is substantial.
WRL provided a great service to the amateur radio community that constituted its
customer base by encouraging anyone passing through Council Bluffs, Iowa...
 As one born in 1958, it's hard to accept that
1960 news is nearly six decades old. I still find myself thinking of the 1970s and 80s
as just a few years ago. The first integrated semiconductor circuits were still being
developed in corporate and university laboratories in 1960. Fairchild announced a year
after this Electronics World article appeared their first commercial IC series,
named "Micrologic." Until then, an integrated circuit meant something like the compact
module of interconnected ceramic substrates with printed thick film resistors and miniature
discrete components. In other news, Raytheon was ready to deploy their giant ICBM tracking
radar system to deal with the emerging global nuclear war threat...
 This Radio Service Data Sheet is for the
Crosley Model 425 (Travo) 4-Tube Portable AC/DC Superheterodyne radio which
appeared in the March 1936 edition of Radio-Craft magazine. No example
of this 1935-era Crosley Model 425 could be found in searches, but interestingly,
the term "Travo" returns a Model 166 by that name and the same year of manufacture.
I post this schematic and functional description of the manufacturers' publications
for the benefit of hobbyists and archivists who might be searching for such information,
either in a effort to restore a radio to working condition, or to collect archival
information...
 Homepage
Archives for November 2024. Items on the RF Cafe homepage come and go at a pretty
fast rate. In order to facilitate fast page loading, I keep the size reasonable - under a megabyte (ebay, Amazon, NY Times, etc., are multiple
megabytes). New items are added at the top of the content area, and within a few
days they shift off the bottom. If you recall seeing something on the homepage
but now it is gone, fret not because many years I have maintained
Homepage Archives.
 Electronic counter-warfare (ECW) has been
around nearly as long as electronic warfare (EW) itself. Controlling what a population
hears on its radios is a fairly simple process since overwhelming a commercial broadcast
station signal requires only a more powerful transmitter. It was commonplace during
wartime for an invading force to set up high power stations in population centers
to block signals meant to inform people of aggressor activity, or even to play music
(a form of psychological warfare as well). Often, not only was the possession of
a personal radio verboten, but even getting caught listening to one could spell
real trouble. However, as with booze during Prohibition, the mere fact that something
was outlawed did not prevent a large percentage of the population from owning and/or
listening to broadcasts. This article by Hugo Gernsback proposes a method for informing
a local area of an impending invasion force in order to forestall panic and irrational
behavior...
 Wayyyy.... back in 1992, RF Design
magazine (Gray Breed was editor at the time) ran a
software
contest. Those were the days when most engineers and hobbyists wrote software
in either Basic or Fortran. I happened to use Turbo Pascal, by Borland. At the time,
I was working as an RF engineer for Comsat, in Germantown, Maryland. Having done
a lot of frequency conversion designs in my previous work at General Electric, and
even more there at Comsat, I had already written a crude program to calculate mixer
spurious products, so this challenge gave me the excuse I needed to refine the user
interface and add some creature comfort features like loadable mixer spur files
and detection of spectral inversion if present. Although I did not win the grand
prize, I did win the runner-up prize. The prizes included having the following article
published in the November 1992 edition of the magazine, a couple experimenter kits
of surface mount inductors and resistors, a T-shirt, and a couple other items. Of
course, the greatest prize as far was I was concerned was having an article published
in a major magazine...
 This December 1940 / January 1941 edition
of National Radio News announces the Federal Communications Commission's
(FCC) approval of the
first 15 FM broadcast licenses for stations spread across the country. It is
also the first issue following America's entrance into WWII and includes a question
from a Ham regarding whether simply listening to radio reports was allowed. As you
might know, the FCC prohibited amateur radio operators from transmitting for any
reason during both World War I and World War II. The reasons given were
clearing the airwaves to make monitoring easier, to prevent intentionally encoded
messages from being sent, and to keep homeland status information from being broadcast.
Homeland status could be ascertained by assimilating reports of who was being drafted
and entering service and from where, who was working at manufacturing plants - where
and what they worked on, what types of material recycling was happening...
 Popular comic strips (aka 'funnies') in
the 1930s and 1940s featured numbskulls, ne'er-do-wells, and simpletons. There was
usually one character in the strip's cast that was smart - at least in a relative
way if not absolute. Being familiar with some of the old comics like Blondie, Barney
Google, Krazy Kat, Beetle Bailey, Gasoline Alley, etc., I can see a definite relationship
between the story line of "Entertaining
Uncle Oscar" and the comics of the era in this short story that appeared in
a 1939 edition of the ARRL's QST magazine. As you might guess, the feller
named 'Ham' is the smart one. Q: Is it irony, coincidence, or premonition on the
author's part that the uncle's name is the same as the ARRL's OSCAR series of Orbiting
Satellite Carrying Amateur Radio(s)?
 When you read today where someone writes
about, "back in the eighties...," you naturally think of 1980-something. This 1949
Radio & Television News magazine advertisement from by Bell Telephone
Laboratories mention of "back in the eighties" was referencing the 1880s, not the
1980s. What was six decades ago at the time is now thirteen decades ago - yikes!
The picture juxtaposes a telephone pole massively populated with horizontal cross
timbers, insulators, and wires, with an engineer holding up a section of coaxial
cable that was in the process of replacing the poles and wires. Thanks to Bell Labs'
relentless R&D efforts, those early single-channel,
short distance twisted pairs were obsoleted by 1,800-channel coax. Fiber optic
cables today typically support more than 30,000 voice channels...
 With more than 1000
custom-built stencils, this has got to be the most comprehensive set of
Visio Stencils
available for RF, analog, and digital system and schematic drawings! Every stencil
symbol has been built to fit proportionally on the included A-, B-, and C-size drawing
page templates (or use your own page if preferred). Components are provided for
system block diagrams, conceptual drawings, schematics, test equipment, racks, and
more. Page templates are provided with a preset scale (changeable) for a good presentation
that can incorporate all provided symbols...
 When reading the opening copy from this 1944's
era Radio News magazine advertisement from the
International Resistance Company, I wonder whether the same can be said of today's
population: "Americans are not sissies. When they know the truth, they can take
it - especially when it relates to the war. It's only when somebody tries to fool
them, that they rear up on their hind legs and yowl." At the time the "war" was
WWII, but today the war and the enemies of our existence as a sovereign nation is
not as well defined. The latest example is the COVID-19 virus cooked up in a Wuhan
research laboratory and released on the world, while politicians, pundits, and media
receiving fortunes and favors from China do their best to excuse and cover the deed.
In 1944, people of the free world would never have succumbed to the useless mask
and business restriction mandates imposed in 2020 and continued through today...
 "Ground
is ground the world around," is an oft repeated saying when talking about making
electrical connections to Earth ground. In a general sense that is true, especially
when referring to electromagnetic radio signals and antenna systems that are in
some manner dependent on the common connection. However, when you are working within
the confines of a localized electronic circuit such as on a printed circuit board
or inside a chassis, there is no guarantee that without proper precautions ground
is not at the same potential everywhere. Poor (high impedance) soldered, crimped,
and bolted connections are among the prime offenders that cause voltage differentials
to arise between points intended to be equipotential. RF frequency signals are particularly
sensitive to even a minor divergence...
 Every time I see something about "transparent
anything" that formerly was know only in an opaque form, I think about the Star
Trek "The Voyage Home" movie (click on the link if you don't know what I mean).
This
transparent ceramic material was a real breakthrough in optics technology in
its day due to the ability to control its degree of transparency or opacity with
an electric field. It would even retain its state with the electric field removed
so use as a data or even image storage device was possible. An ability to be quickly
switched (at up to a 10 MHz rate) held promise for it as a laser or other light
source modulator or even as a high speed facsimile (fax) system. It seems sort of
like a solid version of a liquid crystal display (LCD). Lots of unique optics terms
appear in this article...
 Lightning has not changed since the days
when Benjamin Franklin flew his special kite during storms. Contrary to some peoples'
belief, he did not "discover electricity;" rather, the experiment proved his theory
that lightning was a form of electrical discharge. Maybe someone has already
pointed this out, but in effect Franklin put into service the world's first
lightning rod. The conductive (wet with rain) hemp rope between the metal wire
spike on the kite and ground (the plate of a Leyden jar) performed the task a lightning
rod is meant to do - lower the difference of potential between the charged clouds
and ground, thereby reducing the likelihood of an electrical discharge. An induced
current traveled along the rope and charged the Leyden jar. If lightning had actually
struck the kite as fables suggest, Franklin would probably have been killed even
though he was holding on to a silk string attached to the bottom of the hemp string
to provide some insulation. Mr. Kirchhoff's current law would have apportioned
the lightning strike current at the knot joining the two strings according to the
respective...
 This has always been one of my favorite
Calvin & Hobbes comic strip episodes. Calvin's father, a patent
attorney, is famous for providing zany explanations to Calvin's inquiries about
physics, astronomy, and other science subjects which he knows nothing about. In
this comic, Calvin is riding in the car over a bridge with "Weight Limit 10
Tons" on it. He asks his father how the limits are determined. His father, whose
name has never been divulged (neither first name nor last name), replies with a
typically hilarious version of what goes into the weight limit calculation. Read
on for explanations on where babies come from, why old photographs are in black
and white even though much older paintings are in color, the sunset, how a light
bulb works, and even Relativity, amongst other things. Bill Watterson was truly
a genius...
 For some reason, the January 1975 issue
of Popular Electronics magazine, featuring the
Altair 8800 Minicomputer construction article, seems to be the most highly prized
of all editions ever published. They regularly sell on eBay for anywhere from $200
to $500, depending on the condition. If you happen to have one or find one at a
yard sale, hold on to it as an investment (or mail it to me and I will hold on to
it). Computers were still a sci-fi mystery type contraption to most people in the
mid-1970's, and were even considered a thing to fear. Movies about evil-minded nerds
hacking into critical databases and commandeering control of all aspects of life
were popular, and even computers like Hal (2001: A Space Odyssey) that usurped control
from its human inventors were giving the weak-hearted nightmares. Even without a
CRT terminal for an interface, the Altair 8800 was a welcome and somewhat affordable
($400, equivalent to about $2,244 in 2022 money) introduction to computer hardware
and programming. For that much money today, you can get a pretty high-power gaming
computer setup. Notice one of the recommended applications... |
