Back to the 1970's! Homebrew Keyboards! Don Lancaster's TV Typewriter

Even though it is outside my normal analog comfort zone, I really liked this video.  Farhan sent it to me, along with this note: 

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As a kid, do you remember Don Lancaster's books? I learnt most of my digital electronics from him. I still have the 7 dollar video generator book on my shelf. He predates the Homebrew Computer Club. In fact, he is probably the reason for the HCC, because he put in the pieces that were used by others like the two Steves to build their own computers.

His most brilliant hack was to build a "TV typewriter" out of standard TTL parts that were just coming out in the surplus market. For $120, you could, if you build etched your own PCBs and managed to pry parts of fellow builder's dead fingers, build a circuit that, if you typed your name, it showed up on the TV screen! Never mind that dad wanted to get back to watching football or mom wanted the kitchen counter to be cleared out. Those days, parents had no appreciation for their kids being on TV, I guess.

In an earlier hack, he encouraged people through his articles in Radio Electronics to build their own Qwerty keyboard. With this in hand, you could, um .. um... well type something and sit back. There was nothing to connect it to. The fun thing was, there were no key switches available. You had to build those as well. Wind your own springs, make your own keytops, Once it was built, you could use a VOM to check that the ASCII bits corresponding to the key you held down would correctly show up on the 7 data lines. I guess the girls were surely impressed. You just needed to carry the power supply with +5, -5v, +12v, the keyboard itself, an ASCII chart and a VOM to school to show off.

Jokes apart, he kept building things and builds them to this day. His TTL cookbook and CMOS cookbooks were the goto books for almost all digital elecctronics hackers. It is a pity that no one acknowledges his knack. He has scanned in a few of his books on his 1990s www.tinaja.com.  Check  https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/cmoscb.pdf

Why does it concern us? He is K3BYG, that's why.

Watch this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-bFV8fHekk

- f

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 So many things from the video resonated with me: 

-- The importance of building and testing, stage by stage.  The narrator admits "I might have screwed that up."

-- Homebrew keyboards!  Make your own keyboard springs you pathetic appliance operators! 

-- Wood box. 

-- Origins of ASCI

-- The scary 1970s.  Indeed.   I started High School in 1972. 

-- Schematic errors!   Oh the humanity!  Erratas. 

-- Appeals to the Digital Gods. (Not as powerful as The Radio Gods.)

-- A Gimmick Twin Lead. 

-- "So many different disciplines went into building this thing..." 

-- A taste of the home computing revolution of the 1970s. 

-- Farhan is right -- he was K3BYG.  But that call now seems to belong to someone else. 

Don Lancaster's unofficial autobiography: 

https://www.tinaja.com/glib/waywere.pdf

Clearly, Don Lancaster has The Knack!