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Unusual/Strange/Antique Items You Own

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2015 7:55 am
by Earthshine
Have any strange or unusual loot hanging around your house? What about some antiques? Or perhaps some items that you WISH you owned?

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2015 4:10 pm
by fafner
Now THIS is an antique: a ZX81 dating from the early 80s.
click for spoilerImage

It worked when I last checked it a good decade ago. However, it seems I have lost the power supply, so I can't check it again until I can locate it again :rolleyes:

It has a whopping 1 kilobyte, I'm sure some of you may not even know how little it is :D That's 1024 bytes, 1024 letters! Some of your posts wouldn't even fit in :lol: But for the more intense programs, there is a massive 16 kilobytes extension on the right, you wouldn't even know what to do with so much at the time :p

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2015 5:14 pm
by Earthshine
Wow. Just wow. I remember hearing about some professional saying years and years ago that the average american consumer would never need any more data than 30kb (or something).

Wow how tech has changed.

Posted: Tue Oct 06, 2015 5:14 pm
by Tetsuwan Penguin
IIRC it used a 5V wall wart type supply. Those things are a dime a dozen, you could probably use an iPhone charger with the right adapter plug.

Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2015 1:11 am
by jeffbert
I had as TRS 80 that I received while taking a home study course on electronics. I was very disappointed, though, because the ad for the course showed a PC that I was to assemble, test, etc. Never even opened the TRS 80, just built interfaces to it. :mad: It had a whole 4kB of ram.

Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2015 6:37 pm
by Earthshine
I don't have a decent camera but my bed frame is from the 1910s (needs some restoration for scratches) that is in good condition. It is really heavy though and is a pain to move whenever I need to move.

I also own a -huge- dictionary from 1905 and a book by Arthur Scott Baily called The Tales of Fatty Coon from 1915. It's a folksy-type whimsical collection of stories about an anthropomorphized raccoon, including one story in which he and his friends played 'barber shop' and shaved his tail :lol:

Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2015 7:13 pm
by Shiyonasan
"Earthshine" wrote:I also own a -huge- dictionary from 1905 and a book by Arthur Scott Baily called The Tales of Fatty Coon from 1915. It's a folksy-type whimsical collection of stories about an anthropomorphized raccoon, including one story in which he and his friends played 'barber shop' and shaved his tail :lol:


This reminds me of a book that my mom got me from a flea market a few months ago entitled "Cobbett's English Grammar" by Alfred Ayres (she got it for me since I'm an English major). It's a book with grammar rules and similar things that was first published in London, England back in December 1818. The version of the book I own was written in 1883 and printed in 1919.

There's some unintentional funny parts in it. For example, the book starts off in the Editor's Note with the sentence, "COBBETT'S GRAMMAR is probably the most readable grammar ever written." Kind of pompous of the editor to say that, wouldn't you say? :lol:

There's also a section of the book called "Errors and Nonsense in a King's Speech", where the author proceeds to mock the statesmen and legislators of the time and their ability to write speeches for the king. A paragraph from this section says the following:

"How destitute of judgment and of practical talent these persons have been, in the capacity of Statesmen and of Legislators, the present miserable and perilous state of England amply demonstrates; and I am now about to show you that they are equally destitute in the capacity of writers. There is some poet who [that] says:"

"Of all the arts in which the learned excel,
The first in rank is that of writing well." *


*This quotation should run;

"Of all those arts in which the wise excel,
Nature's chief masterpiece is writing well."
SHEFFIELD, Essay of Poetry.


Pretty harsh words from the author, isn't it? :lol:

Posted: Wed Oct 07, 2015 7:53 pm
by Earthshine
People didn't play around back then when it came to claims, they did not have to prove if anything was true or not they could say anything! :lol:

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 12:54 am
by diehard67
IMG_20151007_184609.jpg
IMG_20151007_184609.jpg (42.41 KiB) Viewed 2414 times

this is my 1963 vintage heathkit IO-14 oscilloscope.
I have it showing a 50hz square wave coming out of that multimeter sitting in front of it.

it mostly works, though some of the vacuum tubes have leaky cathode heaters and some of the filament voltage gets into places it shouldn't and because of that I have to keep the vertical cal adjustment inside all the way down or I can't get the trigger to work.

Posted: Thu Oct 08, 2015 1:07 am
by Tetsuwan Penguin
Nice scope. At the time that was one of Heath's best with a 5 Mhz B/W.

I have two old Tek's, a 454 and a 465, both dual trace 100 MHZ or so. I got both used, probably paid about $450 for both (purchased about 30 years apart). Got the 454 at an employee auction where I used to work, they threw in a scope cart, bunch of probes and the service manual. The 465 was an impulse buy on eBay, also came with probes (not Tek), and the manual on CD-ROM. The 465 works nicely in XY mode, so I use that with my Heathkit IT-1121 curve tracer.

I have a 1930 Majestic Radio model 330 chassis that I started to rebuild to install in my grandfather's old liquor cabinet that used to be a radio. I wanted to turn it back into a radio again. Wasn't able to figure out what make/model it used to be, but I know it was from about '29-'33, so I looked for a chassis from that era.

The Majestic chassis is a superhetrodyne (the original might have been a TRF-Neutradyne). Tube lineup is a '58 rf amp, '58 mixer, '56 oscillator, '58 if amp, '55 second detector, first AF amp, '59 power amp, '80 full wave rectifier. I even found a proper electrodynamic speaker with a field coil that the Majestic set probably used.


I also have a GE model 219-221 dual band broadcast receiver that is just like the one my grandparents used to have. Found that one on Ebay, and I started to restore it. It's a six tube "all-american 5" set with the following tube lineup:
12SK7 RF (BCB only), 12SA7 converter, 12SG7 IF, 12SQ7 detector-1st AF, 35L6GT AF output, 35Z5GT rectifier. Weird that the RF stage isn't used on the SW band (set tunes 6-10mhz as well as 520-1600khz). This one needs re-capping and cleaning.

I've managed to find NOS and good used tubes for both of these radios.