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Some of my pocket computer collection. Taken with a vintage Pentax Z10 camera loaded with Rollei Infrared film, using a deep red filter.
As you can see, our broadcasting studio was really outdated by the point when this photo was taken.
We had rotary pots on the broadcasting board, I would spin CDs for music and even a throwback to the 1950s by using tape carts for all my jingles, promotions and even commercials for products which long existed.
I was the last DJ at the station to know how to record carts and even where to get them. Carts had been bypassed by computer automation at almost every commercial station in America since 2000, and yet, there I was with my carts!
About 3 years ago, WPKN decided to move out of the old studios and into brand news ones right in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut.
When I recently visited, I couldn't believe my eyes. The cart machines were nowhere to be found and there were just a few scattered CDs laying around in a rack inside the studio. Back in my day, we had a catalog of at least 25,000 CDs. I wonder what the station did with all of them?
Another thing that caught my attention is that the broadcasting console had been replaced with a modern kind which uses sliders instead of the round dials as shown in the photo above.
Talk about a future shock for me! Throughout my lengthy radio career which goes back to 1977 on other stations as well as WPKN, we always had the traditional round radio dials called "pots" for potentiometers.
I was both fascinated and a little saddened at how far broadcast technology had come since I left the industry in 2009. Oh well, time moves on.
By the way, this is NOT the phone company. See if you can figure out what this place was and the function these women performed. It's actually a very obscure part of American History.
I've been in the corporate programming biz since graduating from college with a degree in computer science in 1982. During my ten year tenure at Lever Brothers, I wrote at least 600 interactive and background CICS programs, most of which communicated with VSAM indexed files as well as TS and TD Queues and a 3270 emulator screen. I always found it somewhat strange that such a large corporation didn't use IBM's relational database DB2. Oh well... back to the Newsweek magazine.
As I was in search of inspiration for a new clock design, I lit this single tube, capriciously selecting the number five. It remained lit on my work table for five days, after which and coincidentally, the final design was complete in my mind. It was then time to set to work.
Vintage Russian numeric display powered by 200V source.
Every function still works - the AM/FM radio, record, play, rewind, forward fast, the built-in microphone, pause and auto-stop at the end of a tape. The only thing I had to replace was one of the drive belts. it's very cool to hear the music I recorded as a 16 year old on the original device. Jimi Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower" is playing right now on an August 1975 recording from WPLR-FM in New Haven, Connecticut.
In the early to mid 1970s I had a small Panasonic AM/FM/Cassette recorder which was used mostly to record hundreds of airchecks (tapes off the radio). The Pioneer deck above was the one I absolutely craved! Unfortunately, it cost in the $800 range - several thousand dollars in today's money.
When I saw one in near-mint condition at a garage sale last summer, the owner wanted 20 dollars for it! That bill flew out of my pocket so fast, all you'd see is a blur. The deck works beautifully and has that warm, analog sound that digital media is simply incapable of.
In this shot, I'm about to play one of the WAVZ, New Haven Top 100 of 1969 tapes in my collection on its original purple and white Lebotone "compact cassette".
I think it's incredibly cool that today's millennials and Gen Z have discovered analog media which were once considered totally dead and utterly passé. That includes both vinyl records and cassette tapes.
I recorded my first cassette off the radio in December 1969 and the last in April 2000, when I bought a CD recorder. Since then, I've digitized most of my favorite tapes, but there's a second wave of lost and forgotten ones being worked on now. The memories recorded on them are priceless.
I think it's incredibly cool that today's millennials have discovered analog media which were once considered totally dead and utterly passé. That includes both vinyl records and cassette tapes.
I recorded my first cassette off the radio in December 1969 and the last in April 2000, when I bought a CD recorder. Since then, I've dititized most of my favorite tapes, but there's a second wave of lost and forgotten ones being worked on now. The memories recorded on them are priceless.
There were also the programs forbidden by my parents which I had to sneak-watch. These included The Outer Limits, The Invaders and Twilight Zone. As a kid, I had a lot of trouble sleeping after viewing them, but was utterly drawn to these amazing sci-fi shows.
This little slice of personal history was taken with my first camera, a Kodak Instamatic 104 using a cartridge of 126 size Kodachrome. A Flashcube provided the lighting. Milford, Connecticut. March 1967
We were watching the Buzzer Channel, which appropriately plays vintage game shows.
Knowing the fragility of the early color TVs, the fact that this RCA Victor still works is nothing short of amazing.
1966 was a pivotal year, when many programs switched from using black and white film (or videotape) to full-color.
At the time, a color console like this one cost a small fortune! Perhaps that's why my friend's parents still have theirs? Nothing like getting your money's worth.
An additional memory: In 1966 at age 7, I used to LOVE the Batman show but we had only one large black and white TV.
My dad was kind enough to drive me to Alexander's Department Store at the old Connecticut Post Mall once a week so I could watch Batman on an array of brand new color TVs!
A scan of one of my Dad's Kodachrome slides. It looks like there's still some unopened goodies under the tree. Unfortunately, what they contained is long gone to time and memory.
This is just a portion of a much larger room. It has nothing to do with a radio station and isn't a computer room.
This boombox features three cassette decks (one recorder and two players). There is a shoulder strap to use in carrying the boombox.
Philco Cathedral Radio, c.1931-1935, Chirk Castle (Castell y Waun), Chirk, Wrexham, Wales. National Trust.
One of the most beautiful objects in the entire castle - a Philco cathedral radio in its figured walnut veneer cabinet, the distinctive axe-head speaker grille with its central finial and sweeping side wings perfectly framing the gold Art Deco dial. This is the golden age of radio design made tangible, and it sits at Chirk entirely naturally - a piece of 1930s American technology in a 13th-century Welsh castle, belonging completely to the world of Lord Howard de Walden and his celebrated guests.
The Philco Cathedral Radio
Philco pioneered the cathedral style with their Model 90 in 1931, creating a design template that dozens of manufacturers would adapt throughout the decade. The vertical orientation of cathedral radios solved practical problems while creating dramatic visual impact - the tall cabinet provided space for large speakers that delivered superior sound quality. The finest cathedral radios featured intricate fretwork patterns cut into their speaker grilles, often incorporating religious or celestial motifs.
Designed by Edward Combs, its classic lines epitomize the cathedral style, which became wildly popular in the 1930s. The particular model here - with its distinctive axe or shield-shaped grille cutouts and central decorative finial - is characteristic of Philco's early to mid-1930s cathedral range. According to Philco historian Ron Ramirez, these sets have been referred to as "the epitome of antique radios," and their classic styling has made them highly sought after for decades.
Radio at Chirk
This set almost certainly dates from the tenure of Thomas Scott-Ellis, 8th Baron Howard de Walden, a prominent patron of the arts and champion of Welsh culture, whose occupation of Chirk from before the First World War until after the Second represented one of the castle's most culturally vibrant chapters. Guests including George Bernard Shaw, Rudyard Kipling and Augustus John visited during this period, and King George V and Queen Mary came in the 1930s. A Philco cathedral radio playing the BBC Home Service would have been as much a fixture of daily castle life as the decanter on the side table or the gramophone in the drawing room.
About 6 months later, I landed a permanent slot on Saturday evenings from 6 - 10pm, which lasted for 19 years until I finally resigned in 2009.
I found this photo online while searching for vintage clock radios. I decided I really liked the look of this speaker, so I adapted it a little and made mine a radio. (See previous pic.)
Note: This came up in random Google images, and lead to an old eBay listing that came up with the "We looked everywhere!" ebay message. I could not find any other verifiable link, so I can't credit anyone for the original photo.
I still member this commercial being aired incessantly in the early 1980s as part of the Coke vs Pepsi wars. Then came the one with Bill Cosby plugging for the new Diet Coke.
Strange as it sounds today, Coca Cola had no diet version until 1982, unless you liked the saccharine flavor of TAB soda, which was one of their classic products from the early 1960s and came in pink cans with a "mod" logo.
Disclaimer ==> We call it "soda" here in the Northeast. Feel free to substitute "pop" or whatever its referred to locally where you live. :)
From 1965, Minolta's first electronically controlled auto exposure camera with a CdS meter. The auto exposure system was a six transistor circuit using the output from the sensor to automatically set the exposure then fire the shutter.
With a really nice Rokkor 40mm f1.8 lens.
Taken with a Sony SLT-A68 and a Sony AF 50mm f1.8 lens.
9 groups, 13 elements. 9 aperture blades - circular aperture. Amazing used bargain. I have a similarish Minolta zoom but thought I would get this to complement my new A68.
This was a pre-amplifier in kit form I bought separately from the NOS valves (tubes). Unfortunately I couldn't get it to work despite much de-bugging. Not much later I bought a 6J1 based buffer amplifier for my turntable for less than what I spent on this.
Lucas Industries were a major 20th century British electrical and electronics manufacturer, supplying Automotive and Aerospace sectors. At one point they had 93,000 employees and 27 sites in the UK.
Semiconductor manufacturing likely started in the early 1960s at the Mere Green Road site in Sutton Coldfield. Many Lucas sites were based in the Birmingham and West Midlands area.
The Mere Green Road site didn't produce any Germanium products, they started with Silicon. They produced a range of low power transistors and diodes, then moved into power transistors. On the same site they manufactured Hybrid package products for both Automotive and Aerospace. The above photo is from the mid 1980s and shows semiconductor workers.
The DT1602 devices are npn with low gains (hfe= 7 &20).
A village near Moscow, the smoke from the stove went into the room.
Kodak Premier Endura Paper 20x20 cm.
Passepartout in a frame, total size 30x30
Special materials for long-term archival and museum storage were used in the manufacture of the frame.
Kiev-60
Volna-3 80mm f2.8
Fujifilm Pro 400H
The history of British Semiconductor manufacturing is pretty convoluted. There are many different brands which ended up being manufactured by the same company, and some major brands which remained from long gone acquisitions.
Mazda was a brand in Britain from 1911, initially for light bulbs, eventually transferring to the Thorn-AEI company.
Brimar's Valve (Tube) and CRT business was acquired from STC in 1960.
Thorn Electrical Industries created a JV in 1961 with AEI, itself a combination of British Electrical manufacturers. The plan was to pull its combined activities in Valves, CRTs and Semiconductors.
Manufacturing was in Brimsdown (adjacent to Ponders End - the site of the Edison Swan Company).
EDISWAN transistors flic.kr/p/X9h24y were also part of the group and its transistors were manufactured in Ponders End.
The original Cosmos Lampworks factory built in Brimsdown was adjacent to the equivalent Edison Swan factory. Through acquisition and growth it seems the factories physically combined, and it's likely that EDISWAN transistors were built in the same place as Thorn, Brimar, Mazda and AEI transistors flic.kr/p/Ncb5yv
However. it's not the whole truth as the CV list from the 60s had AEI and Brimar transistors manufactured in Kent flic.kr/p/LvS7sR
All above are working Germanium transistors (low Vf).