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Show us your junk!

neuromodulator

I love junk, specially when it can be fully restored, has interesting parts or uses interesting technology. Most of the junk I get, comes from the university, its dumped because its either too old or it doesn't work anymore. I'll start this thread by showing one of my latest junk acquisitions:

 

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This is an autotransformer made by a company called "The Superior Electric Co" from Bristol, Connecticut. It was apparently build in the 60s (according to what I found in the net) and supports a max of 1.2 kva. The autotransformer works as expected but of course it shows its age, the rubber cable is not in the best condition and so isn't its paint. In the future I may repaint it and replace the cable but for now its good enough as it is.

 

Have you also found nice junk? Show us!

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  • I have this:

    image

    It's still functional but it does occasionally throw a wobbly - I was going to take a look and see if it's anything obvious.  What's not very surprising is that it is slow.  5! takes an absolute age to calculate. 

     

    I also have something else interesting which I am intending to write a seperate short blog about!

     

    With respect to the earlier discussion about core memory, it's a really interesting technology.  It is a destructive read: IIRC, you read it by writing a 0 to the bit and if you get a signal on the sense wire you know it was a 1 so you have to remember to write that back; they were all hand-made (by woman of course) and I've never found any information that indicates machines were involved in automating the process; each ring has four wires through it which must go through in a specific way so sewing them together was an art given the size - down to 0.1mm by the end of the technology (again, IIRC but I could be wrong about that); they were also used as 'Core Rope' memory where, because the memory is non-volatile, it could be used to store a program, which is how it was used in the Apollo mission control computers.  I just have this image of a room full of nans (grandmothers for the non-native English speakers!) knitting computer programs together, drinking tea and spending the day nattering with the click-clack of needles.

     

    Core memory is cool but even cooler are mercury delay lines as used on EDSAC and LEO computers.  Pulses stored as waves in mercury to be interpreted as 1 and 0.  And cooler again - debatable, I like the mercury delay lines?  Dekatrons: decimal memory that is human readable.  Slow as hell but mesmerising to watch in action.

  • in reply to Andrew J

    did a good write up on calculator reworking back to lif. Maybe he can point you to some things to try.

    Clem

  • in reply to clem57

    Thanks Clem - that's a good pointer.

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