Відео

John: Thank you for leaving this comment. I'm the guy from the video here and believe I've spoken recently with your sister. If you have recollections about Mike, or the company as your dad was involved I'd be happy to hear of them for the book I'm writing. You can reach me at bzotto@gmail.com, and she also has my info. Thanks!

No way! That's so cool. Thanks for sharing the connection.

Thanks! I credit the music for the the vibe. (The content is secretly uncut nerd!)

Unfortunately no, the printer has a character generator ROM onboard and just turns buffered ASCII characters into dot patterns.

Printer + TV typewriter was a whole lot of DIY, that was a real moment in time. If you feel like working something out for a good new home for your PR40 please do drop me a note! (bzotto at gmail), the one in the video is a loaner. In any case thanks for watching and sharing the memory!

@@bzotto At this point it’s not in the best of condition. But if I decide to let go of one of my dear memories, I will certainly let you know. Frankly, it would be in a better place than just on the shelf, collecting dust.

​@@philipershler420 Thanks for the reply-- fair enough and inbox is always open. ;) Meanwhile stay tuned for more stuff of the era...

@@bzotto 4:22

Your use of the word "helical" here sent me down a rabbit hole. I hadn't been sure how to describe this track, but I think helical is correct since it causes the carriage to trace out a straight line. Thanks! and glad you enjoyed

The dream!! In practice you can’t prevent the line breaks- the rotation of the platen is part of the carriage mechanism. But you could still have strips of 240x7 or so horizontal bitmaps :)

yup now i rarely use a printer but back then you needed more stuff on paper in general .since computers weren't everywhere and there was no internet .

We stand on the shoulders of giants (Notepad)! Bless up

Haha ahoy VCF neighbor!

It is so back.

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed and found it interesting. It was fascinating, (very slightly) ahead of its time, and also completely frustrating and difficult both in its time and, it turns out, even now. :) But this has been a fun project. Watch out Septandy here we come. (?)

Honestly this one had a hard time with practical applications! There were a few documented productive uses, though.

Fantastic. Love the R family! Thanks for saying hello

The 64k memory board is new; everything else is original. It required a fair bit of (offscreen) effort to repair and restore to functionality-- Spheres could be a bit touchy even in their time!-- but what you're seeing here is real.

yes but to my question, the boards are original bar one, but the Case ans Keyboard do not match the original Sphere as shown in your intro photos unless there are 2 versions of the sphere etc. So it looks like the case is a reproduction with a period keyboard and the sanyo monitor (not used in the original). @@bzotto

​@@retrobytes.v65 There were two keyboards styles used during production; the one I have is the later revision without a numeric keypad (and with some minor other layout differences). Most of the period marketing images show the earlier keyboard, which explains the mismatch. The keyboard, metal casework, and indeed even the hacked-up Sanyo display component are all original. If it looks... simplistic? Questionably designed? Well, you might not be wrong about that-- but you'll have to take it up with the folks in the 70s. :)

“Life” is so cool! Glad you found a rewarding rabbit hole

It makes for a fun side project to the real projects!

Yes do email me! (Addr on my site or on the YT about page for this channel). Neat. I don’t have anything digital for the original boards. They’re all 8x10”. There are decent size photos on my Resources page.

@@bzotto thanks! I have been working from the photos as some of the schematics are a bit fuzzy

@@colonelbarker lol the schematics are awful!

@@bzotto I'm grateful to have them, I'm repairing a TAB Terminal at the moment and the internet won't even acknowledge it exists and there are obviously zero schematics! Your enthusiasm for the Sphere is infectious

Hard to say whether it was that much ahead of its time as such, but it was certainly (slightly) earlier to market than a lot of systems that could do what it did in an integrated way. Sphere did advertise heavily in the early hobbyist rags (Radio Electronics then Byte and Kilobaud etc), but never really picked up a ton of traction with broad user base, so it seems it was in some senses overlooked and forgotten. You were certainly better off with the VIC: Sphere's design was slick, but its guts was real delicate and quirky stuff that turned out to require dedicated electronics enthusiasts to wrangle into reliable systems. Nonetheless, and despite its market failure and disappearance, I do think the Sphere is important, and is unfairly overlooked in the history, and that's why I'm writing a book about it. I agree that the big 2-watt carbon composition resistors look awesome! (You can get these surplused for cheap if you want to use them in your own projects.)

Yes, for better and for worse, as it turned out at the time :-)

Thanks, glad you enjoyed!

Thanks, and I like your suggestion. The CRT system is interesting on its own terms. At heart, it’s a very faithful implementation of Ed Colle’s published “TV Typewriter II” circuit. Sphere swapped in Motorola RAMs for the text buffer and connected those to the main system bus. The upside is memory mapped video (fantastic!), but the downside was no bus/access locking so you end up with white “snow” when software updates the text. The other downside is it inherited the 32x16 resolution which may have seemed ok for a TV Typewriter but is really too cramped for nontrivial software. The Apple-1 design uses essentially a serial terminal display circuit for its video because Woz had a design of his own for that already hanging around. It had a higher and much more reasonable text resolution, but could only output text serially from the bottom of the screen like a typewriter (and I believe rather slowly as well). Woz was a gifted designer and his system ran very well for what it did, and in the Apple II he moved to memory mapped text at good resolution and cleverly used that for RAM refresh as well, a very smart design that was better than many predecessors including the Sphere and his own Apple 1, but that was two years later. Anyway, great thought for a deeper dive. Stay tuned…

@@bzotto it's certainly an interesting topic, I was wondering about the access and the snow. Now you have pointed it out the Schematics for the sphere CRT board are of a very similar layout to the TVT: 2 . I have been meaning to build a TVT2, but unlike the 1 it's not modular with as much testing and documentation. I look forward to more of your thoughts on the sphere!

Pretty much, yes. And it’s not necessarily the same address- it’s more that there’s no control at all to switch between CPU access and the video output circuit, so what happens is stuff gets written somewhere in video memory but its remnants on the bus at that moment end up in the video dot shift registers and get displayed for a frame

Precisely. The snow is accidental bit states getting sucked into the video dot shift registers.

That is correct but actually that’s not even what this Repeat was- the repeat key here sent a separate signal to the computer boards that could be read and interpreted in software. It did nothing at all by default!

The feed holes are punched by the device! The "blank" tape is just blank. It's slightly oiled when paper and it has tight thickness tolerances but people do use various substitutes

Thanks! Yes, the videos here are short and sweet but the project has been pretty immense, super interesting exploration for me and will result in a book, all to the good. It was excellent for 1975-- marketing was perhaps one challenge, although they suffered some real production challenges as well-- just getting enough working, reliable systems out into the world, and then keeping up with hardware and software evolution in that very fast moving early market. TRS-80, TI and Commodore were all large corporations with a lot of resources. Apple is the one that stands out as the garage startup that made it, and their story has all sorts of contingencies to it, as well.

Well, for the time being I can offer you a web emulator! sphere.computer/emulator/

You mean before the SIM/1 board came along at the start of '76? It sounds absurd but people would have to re-enter their programs at system startup. The more technically sophisticated users could (and some did) cook up their own one-off serial interfaces by connecting via the system bus plugs-- that would have allowed a connection to teletype or similar hardware with paper tape punch etc. (Some versions of the Sphere CPU board had serial-capable hardware built in, and that was operable a couple months before the SIM/1 board was available.) There was no third party hardware as such available commercially. This sounds bananas of course, but by comparison the first several months of the Altair's existence was similar -- just lights and switches -- before their own serial board became available around summer/fall of '75. There was such massive pent up demand for microcomputers that people were, if not happy about, at least accepting of the massive limitations they suffered as they rolled out-- the idea of building and actually conveniently using nontrivial pieces of software was not the immediate need.