TV Typewriter Remembered

I think to appreciate the TV Typewriter you have to appreciate how freaking expensive printers and typewriters were relative to the cost of the computer[1]. Don't TVT was 16 x 32 because that was exactly 1024 characters which fit in one static RAM chip. The Apple ][ could, and did display 40 columns (also 16 rows) on an unmodified TV. That kind of output was SO MUCH more useful than looking at the blinking lights on the front panel. It was also cheaper than what a 24 line by 80 character terminal would cost you.

[1] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/pacificOfficeSystems/Pacific_Of...

As the Hackaday piece says, the TV Typewriter was given to the world by the recently departed Don Lancaster:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36545595

My dad built one of Lancaster's TV Typewriters back in the '70s for a black & white TV studio system. It was a huge improvement in speed and correctibility for static onscreen text overlayed on the video output, when previously it was done with physical hardware and chroma key using white letters on a black background.

I'm still processing Don Lancaster's impact on the electronics hobbyist scene of my generation. In fact I was a little young to have been Don's "target audience" but I grew up with these Hayden, SAMS and TAB books that a young-me flipped through. That these books even existed, squirreled away on a shelf in a remote corner of B. Dalton Bookstore, informed me even then that mere mortals could do this stuff — build TV typewriters, computer-controlled robots, communicate wirelessly along a laser beam, etc. Too bad I couldn't afford a $250 6502 processor back then, ha ha.

In fact of late I've begun collecting Don's books (and others of the era) — I suppose because as Kondō Marie says, they spark joy for me.

I would add Forrest M. Mims III as another luminary of that early TTL hobbyist era.

I was considering who our current hobbyist luminaries are and Ben Eater seemed like an obvious choice. But a difficulty I have is that he is still illuminating the 70's ... in a manner.

Limor Fried is another name I came up with — and she is firmly planted in the modern era of microcontrollers, wireless communication, etc. But she's also been eclipsed by (subsumed by?) her business.

Maybe it was in fact the existence of the bookstore and the Radio Shacks of the 1970's that winnowed down the hobbyist leaders to the handful we remember. Today I suppose the helping hands are to be found among the collective contributors across Hackaday, YouTube, etc.

As beautiful as the 70's era was, perhaps we are after all living in a golden age for the electronics hobby. Prices for components were never this low and the wealth of shared knowledge never this broad for the budding hobbyist.

The paper (cheap brownish paper on a roll) output from a teletype was a waste because no one ever much looked at it after it rolled out if sight. I joined a computer manufacturer having said I could use a teletype (I never had) but soon we had video terminals - imagine!

I have the fondest memories poring over Don Lancaster's book during a summer in the late 70s, then building a TVT and interfacing it to my KIM-1. I went on to write a hand-assembled monitor program, so I could enter code using a surplus QWERTY keyboard and a cast-off rack-mount black and white monitor that my dad found for me. I was about 16 or 17 years old.

Some people never forget their first teenage crush, but for me, it was that KIM-1. It was a total obsession.