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The vintage technology guide James Grahame ESSENTIAL RETRO: The vintage technology guide Copyright © 2006 by James B. Grahame All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews. For information write to Sputnik Books, P.O. Box 69010, Calgary, Alberta, Canada T2Y 4T9. http://www.essentialretro.com 1st Sputnik Books ed. ISBN 0-9736838-1-3 Printed and bound in the USA and UK at Lightning Source, a Division of Ingram Industries Inc. This excerpt from ESSENTIAL RETRO includes a single chapter, The Magic of Videogames. To order a copy of the full book, see below: UNITED STATES & WORLDWIDE www.essentialretro.com (Offi cial Site) www.amazon.com www.bn.com (Barnes & Noble) CANADA www.essentialretro.com (Offi cial site) www.amazon.ca EUROPE www.essentialretro.com (Offi cial site) www.amazon.co.uk To Gita & Paul, who suff ered with great dignity through countless boring tales of old gadgetry and are my daily reminders of all that is good in this world. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Contents Treasures From a Golden Age 1 Mechanical Retro Things 3 The Wonderful World of Hi-Fi 35 Exploring the Television Age 69 Invasion of the Microcomputers 81 The Magic of Videogames 113 Electronic Musical Instruments 135 Cameras and Optical Gadgets 151 Shooting Movies on Super 8 165 Household Retro Stuff 191 Classic Toys for Modern Fun 201 eBay Tips and Tricks 212 Conclusion 215 Index 218 Treasures From a Golden Age We live in an age of wonder. Each new year welcomes thousands of innovative devices that are smaller, faster and more beautiful than anything before. It is easy to get caught up in an endless quest for the ultimate new gadget, but don’t forget that many brilliant old machines are hidden away in attics and garages throughout the world – forgotten movie cameras lie on dusty shelves beside obsolete computers and classic mechanical toys, all crying out to be rediscovered and brought back to life. That’s what this book is about – rediscovery. It’s not a catalogue for collectors or a price guide for eBay sellers. The goal is to introduce you to as many vintage (or classically styled) gadgets as I can sanely cram into a couple of hundred pages. Treat this as an opportunity to revive the styles and technology of bygone eras, and to discover an earlier age of elegant mechanics and hand- drawn design. It’s hard to tell which of today’s gizmos will become the design icons of our era, but it’s easy to pick out beautiful and definitive devices from the past. And – best of all – yesterday’s technology often sells for an infinitesimal fraction of what it cost new. So, rather than spending $1000 on a brand new camcorder, risk $50 Treasures From a Golden Age 1 on a mint-condition Super 8 camera. Or invest in a vacuum tube amplifier instead of the latest digital surround-sound wonder box with its baffling remote control. Your digital watch has stopped running? Go mechanical and you’ll never worry about dead bat- teries again. We take the breathtaking pace of technological change almost for granted. Just don’t forget that most new equipment supplants something from an older generation – a new Xbox 360 videogame console might replace a classic Super Nintendo Entertainment System, and so on. Eventually, older machines find their way to garage sales and flea markets, where they often sell for a handful of spare change. I’ve tried to list sources for the gear I mention, but many old items – like the beautiful wooden Gfeller Trub telephone and Audio Technica’s brilliant Sound Burger portable record player – are almost impossible to find at sane prices. The Internet is partially to blame, since interesting old devices often gain cult status on forums and Blogs. And, once a gadget becomes widely known, it frequently becomes the focus of aggressive bidding on auction sites like eBay. The solution is to get your hands on machines that make you wonder why no one has discovered them yet. Rest assured that the masses will follow. One book can’t possibly cover every must-have piece of technol- ogy from the past few decades. You’ll quickly discover that each chapter of Essential Retro provides only the mere tip of an iceberg. Rather than mindlessly cataloguing everything, I picked and chose things that caught my eye and imagination. Hopefully, some of these wonderful machines will capture your heart like they did mine, and you’ll find yourself collecting and using magnificent contraptions from years past. 2 Essential Retro >> Th e 1970s saw the birth of the arcade phenomenon, and people rushed to bring the technology home. Videogaming Th e magic of Videogames Videogames changed the way people played in the 1970s and 1980s. Even though they enjoyed considerable popularity, early games were incredibly crude because they lacked programmable digital logic circuits. By the late 1970s, simple microprocessors were cheap enough to serve as the heart of quite sophisticated home gaming units. Home videogame systems were an incredibly clever application of early micro- computer technology. They required no keyboard, no tape or disk storage, no operating system or programming languages, very little memory, and no expen- sive video display (apart from your living room TV set). And, since there were no third-party developers (until Activision in the early 1980s), users had to buy all of their games from the manufacturer. Simply brilliant. The Magic of Videogames 113 Classic -bit Videogaming Allow me to introduce a handful of ground-breaking game con- soles that defined the industry until the introduction of sophis- ticated 16-bit consoles in the late 1980s. Millions of these units were made and they often sell for only a few dollars at garage sales. The games are incredibly simple compared to today’s sophisticated offerings, but that is a significant part of their charm. An early 1970s game of Table Tennis on the original Magnavox Odyssey. The game cartridge slot is on the front side of the unit, and the controllers featured a pair of knobs – one for moving the paddle, the other for applying spin to the ball. Magnavox Odyssey : Computerless gaming (1972) Th e Odyssey was the fi rst home videogame console, released in 1972. Th e unit was best known for a 2-player game called Table Tennis, although a total of 12 game cartridges were available (six shipped with the console itself). Th e system didn’t use a micro- processor, relying instead on an intricate network of discrete electronic components to generate a couple of paddles, a tennis net and a bouncing ball. Th e game cartridges had a series of jump- ers that modifi ed the game play by moving or removing the net and controlling how the ball and players interacted. To make the games more visually interesting, a set of transparent screen over- lays were provided. Th ere was considerable public confusion about the system – many people mistakenly believed that it only worked with Magnavox televisions, an inaccuracy that Magnavox was in no hurry to cor- 114 Essential Retro rect. Over 350,000 Odyssey systems were sold before Magnavox replaced it with the simplifi ed Odyssey 100 system in 1975. Atari Pong comes home (1975) Atari was founded by Nolan Bushnell, designer of Computer Space, the fi rst arcade videogame. After trying out the Magnavox Odyssey in early 1972, he set about building his own version of electronic ping-pong and named it Pong, after the sound the ball makes when hitting the table. It was a runaway success. Magnavox quickly claimed that Atari had infringed on their ball-and-paddle gameplay and sued. Th e case was eventually dropped when Bushnell agreed to pay royalties on each Pong unit sold. Almost 40,000 Pong coin-operated games were manufactured. Bushnell continued to build Atari’s arcade business, but was deter- mined to crack the home market as well. Atari designed a home The modern Atari Flashback 2 console includes PONG as a hidden ‘Easter Egg’ version of Pong that included digital on-screen scoring, something game. It requires a couple of classic the crude Magnavox Odyssey didn’t off er. Th e scoring system was Atari 2600 paddles to play. based on a single chip, something that no other manufacturer had managed up to that point. Th ey struggled to fi nd a distributor until Sears & Roebuck took a risk and purchased 150,000 units for the Christmas 1975 season. Th ey sold out. Atari released a number of Pong derivatives in 1976 and 1977, including a 4-player version. One such game – Video Pinball – replaced the simple Pong chip with a microcontroller. Th is enabled it to play pinball and a breakout game in which a ball and paddle were used to knock down a wall of bricks. Even after these early successes, the best was yet to come. Velleman Classic TV Pong kit Electronics kit maker Velleman markets a Classic TV game kit that lets you build a modernized version of Pong. Th e graphics are black & white and extremely rudimentary, but that’s part of its charm. Th e kit features single and two player modes, so you can include your signifi cant other in your latest electronic obsession. Simple though it is, I fi nd myself wanting to build one into an old upright arcade case. [www.vellemanusa.com] Velleman’s Classic Pong kit may not be sensible, but it certainly looks like a great way to brush up one’s soldering skills.