Top Tag
The invention of the microprocessor is probably the single biggest contributor to the onset of the digital era. It was invented by a team of logic architects and silicon engineers, Federico Faggin, Marcian (Ted) Hoff, Stanley Mazor, and Masatoshi Shima, for Busicom, a Japanese calculator company. The chip set they developed included a what would become iconic chip the 4004 (3).

You may also like

History of Porters

I thought that it might be a good idea to write some posts about the history of beer rather than just a bunch of status updates and “how to” articles. So we are going to kick this mini-series off by going out of order. I wanted to do an overall history of beer but that is going to take longer than I thought and I wanted to get the history of Porter out before I share a few bottles of my Baltic Porter with some of you. So here is the History of Porter. The Porter is one of the more ambiguous and unclear beer styles seconded (perhaps tied with) the Stout. Sure on it’s own the stout if fairly unique but when you’re asked to differentiate between a porter and a stout you’d be hard pressed to come up with a good list of differences (as per style). This posts focus will be the history of the porter but due to their similarities it will be, at least in part, a very brief history of the Stout until the styles split. A quick bit of background,...

Dumont RA-502/503 A

This is a very attractive and reasonably sized 1950s black and white television. This will be a longer restoration as all of the caps and most resisters need replaced. It appears that all of the tubes are intact and there is no damage to the case. This post will be updated as the project progresses.

Webster Chicago Model 78-1

This wire recorder was picked up at a very good price on eBay. The recorder appears to be from 1947 and is in excellent condition given its age. There are some paint chips but nothing too noticeable and there is no rust! This post will go through the process of recapping the unit and replacing...

Pioneer CLD-V190 (Repair)

This post is about the repair of a Pioneer CLD-V190 laserdisc player, I bought in “working condition”. When plugged in and turned on the player made a very loud clicking noise and the video and audio was subpar (this format was known to have good quality video and audio). For the purposes of this post I wont go into the details of how the player works or its history since that was done on the time line. So first things first, lets tear it apart. It was obvious from the symptoms (so I thought) that there were two issues, one it doesn’t play clearly (so I assumed the laser was misaligned from shipping ) and the annoying clicking noise. Since the easiest fix in my mind was to fix the clicking noise, I chose to look at that first. It was fairly obvious that it was coming from a worm gear assembly attached to the area where the laser mechanism pivots. But that was all that was obvious. From the view of the picture above all I...