retro tech

My 5th Christmas was when our family got our first computer, loaded with a 360KB external floppy drive and a ton of cartridges - including a Microsoft Basic cartridge.  My love of writing code began with this machine and I still have it to this day.

Pre-Internet, the only resource I had to explore electronics was the library and subsequent magazines and books I found there.  Probably the one that influenced me the most was Radio Electronics.  I was a longtime subscriber until probably at least 1998.

Around 10, I started playing with Helium-Neon lasers - well before diode based lasers were a thing.  I scavenage my first He-Ne laser, power supply and a ton of first surface optics from a checkout stand scanner assembly a neighbor save from the trash after it failed at one of his grocery stores.  Initially I used it for some early double slit experiments, rudimentary XY scanning prototypes and Halloween effects.  My laser obsession continued to include diode based, Spectra Physics Argon-Ion, DPSS and Fiber Coupled Systems.

Radio Electronics introduced me to mail order electronic surplus companies and ordering COD.  Meredith Instruments was my goto for lasers.  When they had a small form factor He-Ne tube on sale, I knew exactly where I was going to install it - a Laser Tag gun.  I was able to integrate the high voltage power supply and squeeze the 18 volts of Ni-Cad batteries where the original AA batteries resided using the small cells from two dissected 9-volt batteries.  Before I added the charge port, loading the 12 small Ni-Cad cells in to the back of it felt like loading an actual gun.

Pretty much as soon as I got my hands on a Game Boy, I tore it apart and had a plan to backlight it.  I found a surplus EL backlight which I quickly integrated into my Gameboy.  It took two iterations. The first had the high voltage EL power supply mounted externally.  The second version, I found I could remove the headphone jack and integrate it internally.  I guess I was ahead of Apple! ;)