Reading through these lab notes, it seems that Mr. Jan [CENSORED] once read about a home-made mini-computer called the HAL-4096 and wanted to build one himself. Enclosed in these notes are letters passed back and forth between Mr. [CENSORED] and Mr. Hal Chamberlin. Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that the HAL-4096 was built by Mr. Chamberlin and a Mr. David Cox back in 1966. Mr. Chamberlin was also the first person to demonstrate music synthesis on a computer, the old classic recording of ‘Daisy, Daisy’ that I’m sure everyone remembers hearing at one point or another.<\/p>\n
I’m just amazed… <\/p>\n
This weekend I was given the amazing opprotunity to look through the basement of my friend’s deceased neighbor, removing whatever electronic goodies I wanted, as they were all about to be thrown away. I ended up with boxes of tubes, some old US Military test equipment, and various control panels. What I ended up with is just a drop in the bucket compared to the total amount of stuff down there.<\/p>\n
It appears that Mr. [CENSORED] was working on two major projects in particular, neither of which he ever finished. The first project, as detailed in the letters I found, was to build a functioning mini-computer. I don’t think he quite understood what he was getting into, though, as one of the letters from Mr. Chamberlin includes the following: “NEITHER MACHINES IS A DESK CALCULATOR OR ADDING MACHINE. BOTH ARE TRUE GENERAL PURPOSE COMPUTERS WHICH MUST BE PROGRAMMED PROPERLY TO PERFORM A USEFUL FUNCTION.” The second project appears to be a rather large Tesla coil. From looking around , I think it’s best that the Tesla coil was never completed, as he seemed to be assembling the thing in his basement, right near a (improperly vented) gas-powered generator and all the other standard basement things.<\/p>\n
As soon as I get photos taken of the equipment, I’ll post it, along with the few photos that were snapped in the basement. There is also the chassis and a number of the cards from a Burroughs analog computer used for industrial controls.<\/p>\n
I think I also ended up with a few things marked US Government Property, including some old punch cards with embedded microfilm that seem to detail electrical components from an ordinance group. These will require more investigation…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reading through these lab notes, it seems that Mr. Jan [CENSORED] once read about a home-made mini-computer called the HAL-4096 and wanted to build one himself. Enclosed in these notes are letters passed back and forth between Mr. [CENSORED] and Mr. Hal Chamberlin. Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that the HAL-4096 was built by Mr.\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,6,15,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-acquired-things","category-electronics","category-found-things","category-moved-from-livejournal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16005,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5626\/revisions\/16005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nuxx.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}