REAL Wargames Tech Teardown!!! 80's Missile Target Display
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- Опубліковано 18 січ 2021
- Let's take a deep dive into a genuine piece of Cold War technology and I'll reminisce about one of my favorite films - Wargames. Enjoy!
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Sadly this isn’t for ICBMs but it is part of a radar console for the AN/SPY-1 naval radar system (and some other systems).
This is also the same radar system that had a “user interface design flaw” that contributed to the USS Vincennes shooting down a passenger airliner in 1988. The incident involved the IFF and position of a passenger Airbus A300 being confused with that of a F-14 Tomcat.
*This particular module ‘UPA-59A’ is designed to display that IFF data.*
There are pictures of those radar consoles on Wikipedia commons, you can see the module on the left side of the main console.
CIC-USS-CarlVinson-2001.jpg
USS-Midway-CV-41-c.jpg
Sadly UA-cam shadow bans my comments if I post links so you'll have to search for them manually.
Wish you could post a link to that. At the time that was chalked up to operator error and being a little jumpy after recent events in the region. It was afaik the first time an event was recorded and played back digitally and showed errors in human accounts. Radar replay revealed the aircraft was not on an attack run as reported by operators.
I think you have the winning comment. I was thinking there were too few digits for nav data & your IFF info fits. Thanks for the info.
@@anullhandle just go to wiki media and search for the names, you'll get the pictures.
Are you sure it's an actual Shadow ban, or the usual thing of comments with links taking a while to show up for other users?
@@anullhandle Also don't forget the USS Vincennes was in Iranian waters when it fired on the Airliner as the Captain of the Ship , William Rogers, decided to pursue Iranian Gun boats against orders. www.britannica.com/event/Iran-Air-flight-655
The movie “WAR GAMES” got more right then most people will ever know. I was in the USAF in the Strategic Air Command” ( responsibilities other then aircraft was nuclear missile silos) and I worked on big aircraft.... when the movie hit the screens... our security went coo coo ... we did a lot of re training and re vamping of security measures
Dammit! Every year or so I get the urge to build a replica WOPR, barely into 2021 and my gears start turning again...
I am planning to build a WOPR PC desktop tower since the nineties. Unfortunately time for pleasant stuff becomes scarcer every day.
Seon makes and sells them:-
www.tindie.com/products/seonr/wopr-missile-launch-code-display-kit-haxorz/
Don't tempt me 😁, I already have too many unfinished projects that I want to get done while this pandemic is keeping me locked inside.
Get some History on the WOPR... www.imsai.net/the-wargames-imsai/
You just Might Build Something Nice..
@@IanScottJohnston holy cow..
Nice shootout for Wargames! Such a visionary movie about the looming dangers of reliance on computers in the modern world, it sure stood the test of time. The display screens in the war room were actually a HP computer graphics tour de force for the time. They were drawn by an HP 9845 workstation driving an HP 1345A vector display, itself re-driving a super-resolution HP 1336A CRT monochrome display. The display was then photographed frame by frame with color filters. I happen to have one of the very 1336A that was used for the film in my collection! But I have not even gotten to turn it on yet...
Marc, care take a crack at reversing this display? 😁
You're the man Marc love your channel too!
I thought that a 1336A is the flywheel part for1957 MERCURY 10HP (Mark 10) :D
IIRC there are "computer animations" from the 80s which were drawn a frame at a time using a plotter. Then photographed.
@@tobyfried DO EEET
As a retired Aerospace engineer, "cut and jump" and ECO's for missing traces was very common for ground equipment. Not worth the money to re-spin the board unless you have a new Rev. with enough changes to warrant it.
Yeah, I remember that from Lockheed.
Chips stamped "Singapore" or "Indonesia" do NOT necessarily means cheap quality. First, a lot of chips back then were made in U.S. fabs and then shipped overseas for packaging. And if a legitimate semiconductor company (like Texas Instruments) is having the chips (wafers) done overseas, quality assurance and testing still applies just the same.
Malaysia is a major packaging hub for all manufacturers. My guess is Environmental laws drive that. This was true back as far as my start in the biz in early 1990s
@@shockwave77598 The low cost of labour was the main reason for device packaging being carried out in countries such as Indonesia, Signapore and Portugal.
can't get enough of fran, slowly working my way through all of her videos
I laid out a lot of similar double sided TTL boards in the late 70’s and early 80’s. The layouts were done with Brady tape and ic stencils. They were laid up 2:1 and later reduced with a camera we had set up in our PC lab. I also had some experience laying out boards for analog stuff with rubylith but all of the interface boards we did were done with stencils. Brings back some fond memories Fran!
That brown goo they used back then use to be clear when the board was made but over time turn brown and becomes conductive and really messed stuff up! I had a Kenwood 440S hf ham radio that that was built in the early 80s with that crap in it! The radio started having issues a few years ago that no one could figure out till one old ham friend of mine looked at it that work on old electronics gear for the government told me that I had to remove all the brown crap and that should fix the issue! Well with hours of picking and cleaning that stuff off the one board that had this stuff on it the radio workd correctly again!
On the last two Vintage Computing Festivals here in Berlin, Germany, there was a guy who displayed his original HP vector CRT screen, the same model of display that was used to project the world map onto the wall screens of the NORAD war room in the Wargames movie. A vector based CRT display! That was awesome! (Edit: HP 9845C is the model number of these displays. And yes, of course they were transferred onto 35mm film beforehand and then projected onto those screens during the filming, but still...not painted or anything, but electronically created!)
I remember working with one of those vector-based terminals (don't remember the brand).
Due to memory shortage, as you added characters at the bottom, the one on the top disappeared!
Wow, watching this brought back memories of my days in the Navy as an Avionics Technician! I worked on a lot of electronic equipment from the F/A-18 aircraft, and saw stuff from other aircraft platforms as well. This video was fun to watch!
The bodge wire was needed for the connection to be made without adding a layer to the pcb, and back in the mid 70's to mid 80's adding a layer to the pcb was prohibitively expensive besides being more delicate. I'm pretty sure it was by design and not a 'whoops' fix.
Nice find and great explanation.
All of the chips from that era were US made. The packaging was done overseas.
The bodge wire is held with a special silicone that is kept refrigerated until used.
The ceramic packages are hermetic, plastic packages are not.
Yes there were special board pulling tools.
The capacitor you called a tantalum is a leaded multi level ceramic.
The part with the window is a uv erasable eprom.
Conformal coating does not pass UV.
Cylindrical cap is indeed tantalum, MLCCs are square and no way you can get 100uF within that size. By the way, USSR-made tantalum caps look exactly the same.
@@oleksandrmusiiaka2334 The one she called a tantalum was a MLC molded in an axial tubular case. I used similar caps in designs in the late 1970s. The 100uF cap was a large Al electrolytic.
Whenever I hear "we're in", my mind adds "like flynn" in Dave's voice.
Haha I was just going to write that same thing once I heard it. 🤣🤣
Davoooo!
Were in like sin!
Same. I even say it all the time at work
It was common to see ti chips from Indonesia back then even mil spec components. I was surprised to see 74 series devices used and not all 54 series. The board is just like what we made, 1970’s aerospace, same conformal coating and same type of layout. The wire jumper could have been an error or a “fix” between the breadboard and etch design. They were allowed in limited quantities but the assembly still had to meet the shake & bake tests. Nice to see it. Thank you for posting the video.
You had me at WarGames.
Skybird, this is dropkick with a red dash alpha message in two parts, red dash alpha!
No doubt! I saw it in a movie theater (pfft, "movie theater" = cement bunker at the end of the mall!) when I was in 10th grade. I give it a rewatch every few years.
Wargames is definatley one of the best films, EVER.
I once did a report for a computer engineering class on the history of "Big Blue and the Seven Dwarfs", meaning IBM (with their famous blue logo) and the seven smaller mainframe computer manufacturers from the heyday of these systems. I briefly discussed at least one notable detail about each of the companies.
All I could manage to find unique about Burroughs was the fact that their systems were often used as props in movies. The B-205 model is particularly cinematic, with its many banks of 'blinkenlights' driving home to audiences the point that "OMG this is serious business! Look at those flashing lights... Those machines could start WW3!"
Apparently a couple of B-205's were sold on to the used market after being replaced at their original home company. They found their way into the prop departments of several Hollywood studios and prop supply/rental companies and made the rounds for decades. It's interesting that some of the very same machines and blinkenlight consoles were used in older films like Dr. Strangelove and Failsafe, and also in far newer stuff like the first Austin Powers film in 1997. Keep all of that in mind the next time you guys are on Jeopardy.
Not actually used with missiles, "just" part of the IFF subsystem on shipboard radar systems. Still cool AF, though, as basically all military electronics are. It's neat to see the lengths they went to in order to make things as reliable as they knew how at the time.
The ceramic DIP packages are often called "frit seal" packages. The top and bottom are ceramic plates and the gap between them around the leads is filled with glass. When manufacturing them the glass is in the form of frit - small particles of glass that have been melted and granulated - and it's all heated to melt the glass to form a seal. These packages can be opened by heating them enough to melt the glass.
Wow it's crazy to see the old yellow ish bords from back then again, when I was little I would take apart old electronic scrap to see what the inside looked like and try to figurout what made the parts work, lol I actually cut a electrolytic capacitor open and a chip like that open to see what was inside😅
I've always been interested in how things worked even now still😸
This is sooo awesome! Thanks Fran for sharing all your hard work and passion you put in your videos
To give it power, you could trace +5Vcc and GND by putting a "ringer" on the appropriate pins on the LED decoder chip(s) (or tacking onto a TTL chip on the plugin PCB and plugging it back into the cage) and finding the pin it goes to on the back DB connector...
The 4 holes on the top of each board was for a card puller. The puller had pins that would fit into the holes, then you would squeeze the puller and the card would get lifted evenly. They usually worked well... sometimes though not so much.
This is very interesting, please bring more vintage pieces like this, especially old military! War games is a classic, I can listen to you talking about it all day as well... thanks Fran
I think it is very unlikely the PCB was hand drawn on vellum. It would be considerably more likely the layout was done with stick on pad patterns and then tape for the traces. Instead of vellum, mylar or acetate sheet was used. You could get sheet with pre-punched registration holes and you taped down little metal parts onto your light table with little protruding pegs for the registration holes. for a two-layer board, you would typically have three plastic sheets. A "pad master", the top traces, and the bottom traces. The photography for making the boards would then of the pad master and the top traces, and the pad master and the bottom traces. Bishop Graphics was a big source of the drafting products for this work and all the pads, pad patterns, and tape was black.. They also developed a scheme using translucent blue and red tape for the two layers. You could put everything on one sheet and during the photo process they just used filters to photo only the black pads and red, or black pads and blue. That certainly made registration problems impossible. However, with a complex board if you needed to make a change, you had all sorts of tape that was taped over other tape and it could be a lot of work to make a change.
PCB traces are probably taped, not drawn. Did ICs ever get packaged in the USA rather than Indonesia etc.? No decoupling caps?
Yeah, the absence of decoupling also got me thinking?
Tried that in the past as a youngster and it made a nice oscillator LOL
Wonder how they got away with it?
edit;
Or did the bodge contains the little decoupling caps?
Looks like it's all or mostly TTL so not nearly as bad as cmos when switching on/off.
The frequency it runs at is probably so slow that it doesn't need decoupling caps. Probably 1Mhz max, if that.
@@simontay4851 Decoupling is more just to prevent oscillation, that doesn't have much to do with how fast or slow the circuit runs.
Also to prevent any ringing from switching outputs.
Had the same question. I feel like I’ve never seen any DIP package (or otherwise) with USA on it.
It would be easy to light this up. The windowed chip is a UV Eprom (2708 probably). It's a 1970's trick to replace a bunch of logic. You put in a digital value on the address lines, you get an 8-bit value on the data lines. It is an easy trick to turn ASCII into LED segments and so on. It isn't encrypted, it's probably dirt simple to power up and send serial data. The boards are discolored normally for TTL. This thing ran 24x7 for 20 years. The mild heat over long time causes the epoxy board to discolor. See it in old computer stuff all the time.
Really fascinating. Great find and thanks for sharing your knowledge.
I really enjoyed this video I like old vintage electronic stuff. I always used to take the TVs in the vcr's apart when I was a kid and get in trouble by my dad and my mom just to see what was inside of them
Like the detail and content of your videos. Absolutely love everything tube related vintage tech. Great Stuff!
One of the reasons for the basic chips, not high priced customs, is they are very stable with a known failure rate. The simple two sided rather than multi-layer boards was the same. No need to conserve space or go fancy. Make a reliable board that can be repaired if necessary. The mod wire was staked down to prevent it from wandering away.
Love your videos Fran. They are so very interesting. And seeing the IMSAI 8080 brought back many memories. I still want to build one; I couldn't afford it back then.
Thank you for hanging in here during the pandemic your channel has been a delightful look into early tech.
Nearly took a job at a British electronics manufacturer in the 1970. They did mainly Naval so could be more cutting edge as they could carry redundant systems. Some of their boards had liquid cooling channels.
I notice some of those boards had been hot.
Dump that EPROM and grep it for "Shall we play a game" ;~)
Grep for joshua also.
Facinating Fran. You fill my world with insights and knowledge that no one has done. Thank you.
Tip for removing the boards, use a hex key that fits in the hold on each side and left. Isn't elegant but it works for me!
These are fantastic videos ... Keep going Fran! We love you
Exactly what I need for my ICBM proj-I mean a friend of mine loves old displays.
well someones on a watchlist
@@amberisvibin if I’m not on all the watchlists it just shows how bad the government is at their job.
@@BobWidlefish lmao
Wouldn't you prefer a nice game of chess?
Wouldn't you prefer some actual missile surplus? This is part of a radar display system... 😉
Yes, there is a special tool for removing those boards. As a mainframe engineer I have quite a few of them and despite them being quite common I cannot find a single picture of one on Google.
Great video. Thank you. I just love the "Wargames" movie. Must have seen it 10 times and still want to see it again.
love the hat! :) Interesting video, it had everything.... fashion, technical info and movie facts :)
The perfect follow up movie to watch after War Games is, Colossus - The Forbin Project... :)
Interesting they went for those pins....just shout out bend me as you push the card in...
Your videos are always such a joy.
Ahh.. i remember troubleshooting boards just like this in the AN/SPA-25G radar indicator. One of the systems every Navy electronics technician learns to troubleshoot in A school.
Thanks for taking the time to share. [17:00] Tank the Arcade coin-op Video game from 70's Game system from factory had a very similar looking Packaging way of mounting it's PCB.
Your bench is far more organized than mine.
WOW! what a walk down memory lane. I worked on IFF systems in 1967 at Trak Microwave in Tampa, Florida. My first job right out of college. After 9 months the military contract was completed and I was laid off till the next contract was awarded. Needless to say I never went back to work for them. Thanks Fran for the memories. Take care.
Plenty of highly interesting stuff again! Thanks Fran.
I got a few thoughts to tell. One is that there were the cylindrical, hermetic seal tantalum capacitors, like the 100 uF you pointed out. They are called Wet Slug types. There are some interesting details about those, like that the case was also tantalum and that made them easily recognizable by just holding them in your hand -- they were heavy. Because the the cap had to be welded to the cylinder, it was a very delicate operation. The melting point of tantalum is way up there in the group of so called refractory metals, such as tungsten and molybdenum. On the other hand, the glass frit seal through the cap melts at much lower temperature. So you want to weld the rim but not the seal. I may still have somewhere a test piece where I failed in another way: I did not realize how sensitive tantalum was to hydrogen which I tried to use (5%) for concentrating the welding arc. Later on, I helped the same friend developing dry tantalum capacitors ("orange dip") type formatting process, but that is a different story.
My take about the 7400 series ICs is that they probably were used, because the boards in this case were not for true military field use. The military chips would have been 5400 series. Also, I don't think the wires to the connector are Teflon. There are clearly wire numbers printed on them with what I believe is a thermal process. I have always understood that you cannot do that on Teflon. At least you could not with the marker that we used.
Finally, one comment mentioned the frame by frame movie production using an HP 9845 computer with some high resolution display. As it happens, I have one of those '9845 guys. I used to describe it as having originally been more expensive than a good family car. And "almost"as heavy. My great regret about it is that I evidently failed to find one essential plug in board among the packing "peanuts" when I received it.
I LOVE "Wargames"! I've seen it a million times! I could listen to you talk about that movie all day, Fran! :D
I loved WarGames! It’s been a few years since I’ve seen i last, but now I really have an urge to watch it again soon.
You would love how HP made the 9100 caclulator, Teflon PCB multilayer, 64 bit, core memory, hundereds of diodes and transistors (handpicked) and all kinds of exotic uses of PCB. I have repaired one, I have the pictures on my site. I never seen anything that comes close, really impressive engineering
A lot of cool info here! Thanks for this, Fran!
"Mr. Lightman, who are you working with?
- Fran Blanche Sir. I must confess that she sent me from the future to steal some parts of your setup for her youtube channel..."
Fran, I really liked this video. I was looking up data sheets as the IC's were shown. Lots of good stuff. Looks like that EPROM ran hot from the discoloration around it. This reminds me of my component level troubleshooting days.
I so much love your videos. As an electrical engineer currently working as a IT sales person and as an ex Ground Based Air Defense Firing Officer it is so satisfying to see this kind of tech and your analysis of it. While other people love to watch Netflix series I'd rather watch you work in the lab. Please keep it coming.
[Edit] I also love all those details on War Games ... need to rewatch it some time ... ;-) ...
Just looking at the brown color of the boards, I instantly have that distinctive smell in my nose. I love it that old electronics 👌🥰
the wiring looked like art designs to me, especially on the main gold chip, good video
That opening scene from the movie has been seared into my brain. I loved the tech, the fear it induced and the secrecy of it all. Way cool.
Fran, the "N00039-85-C-0044" contract number tells you that the "Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command" (N00039) _awarded_ this contract in FY85, i.e., between Oct 1984 & Sep 1985. I don't recall what the "C" means, but the 0044, if I remember correctly, means this was the 44th contract they awarded (in total) in FY85. This contract may have been the "original" contract number or possibly a "maintenance" contract, etc., (I never worked with contracting stuff other than having some of them inflicted on me over the years). Seeing the varied chip dates does imply that your intratarget unit was maintained over the years of its use. And that Hazeltine may have used whatever chips they had on-hand given the '70s & '80s chip dates. ;)
Great needle in the hay stack find Fran, keep up the great work, very much appreciate your efforts in US classic electronics...
I could spend all day listening to Fran talk about WarGames!
Very interesting and enjoyable to watch and listen to. One of my all time favourite movies 👏🏻
Avionics Engineer in my early career similar to this timeframe. Mentor always insisted stuffing all DB pins as that was part of the connector retention force including the lock screws. Never saw a written requirement on that but still do it to this day.
Worked for the MOD(UK Defence agency) in the 90s in a secure building that was opened in '87. All the equipment used had to have been in production for a least 10yrs before they would install it. Saw a lot of equipment built to similar specs as your display. Some designs were that old that the only service engineer who understood it had long retired. Cost a fortune to get these guys in to service it. Funny thing is that we were still using tape drive computers and telex machines. They did a benchmark test against the fastest pc available at the time vs a Tandem mainframe. The Tandem wiped the floor of it, not a high clock speed but when you've got a dozen or so mainboards running parallel processing, they didn't need to be. Fascinating world to work in though.
Amazing stuff so rare to see, hahaha that old fashion way to make circuits are interesting and beautiful , thanks for sharing
A 72 pin connector, how 1980's. Lots of data available on that ID-1844A/UPA-59A display on the internet. Possibly even a circuit diagram. Used in lots of radar targeting display units.
I believe that’s a DB37 connector. (Edit) Just realized you must be referring to the board edge connector...72-pin.
Thank you so much for reminding me about the movie Manhattan Project! I last saw it in the 80's when I was about nine years old, and a couple of scenes are still burnt into my retina, so for the longest time I've been wanting to see it again. I just couldn't for the life of me remember the title, or any actors or details from the plot, until now!
Once again Fran. You are the Indiana Jones of Electronic Archaeology. Absolutely fascinating and Interesting to see that the 1970s/1980s Military Industrial Complex use generic public domain components to keep costs down and the "Lowest bidder" wins. Eternal Thanks!
In the mid-1990s I got tasked with removing an old GEAC library computer system. It's construction was the superset of what you have there: two half height racks mostly filled with drawers of bus back planes and everything on circuit boards, quite a few of which had ribbon cables running between various boards. I did see some soldered wires like the one on the back of that board in it.
Traditional fun there were two hard drives. I disassembled one to see what was there and still have one of the platters from it. It's aluminum, about the size of an LP, with a spindle hole large enough most modern hard drives could pass through it, and If you hang it in such a way that it isn't dampened and then tap it it rings like a bell.
Hey Fran, you mentioned about heat discolouring a few times. I urge you to have a look at some boards out of older Lincoln electric welders.
Oh yeah, I'm forever sweeping up electrons here in Australia 🤭
My favorite part of the movie Wargames is when a watch commander tells a touring visitor to push the button and as she does, the alarm goes off and the commander yells, “god, you pressed the wrong one!” Only to reveal a welcome screen; the look on her face is so funny as she thought she launched WW3.
Rumor has it she's still changing her panties to this day.
I love how they play the sound of the Challenge Stage music from Galaga when it reveals the welcome screen. I further love how they want us to believe that irl SAC Norad is in the habit of letting tour groups with cameras come into a highly restricted military site lol. Still one of my favorite movies though.
@@alansmithee183 OMG, that’s right! Makes sense since Galaga is featured. Good ear!
Fran, PLEASE POWER IT UP !!! +5V is easy, use any TTL, pin 7 is GND and pin 14 is +5V. If you wanna go deeper, the board with transistors and the Motorola MC chips looks like a voltage regulator, simple to reverse engineer, the datasheets are available... anyway, just the 5v might give a great result!
Interesting to see the 7400 series mixed in with the 5400 series.
It is incredibly well mounted.
The boards are hand made! Look at the the traces. I remember that in the 70's electronic magazines had ads of very narrow tapes to do that.
About the chips encapsulation : all military applications used ceramic versions of the chips, always. This made them much more trustable, heat resistant and enduring.
I love the soldering on this. Its absolutely perfect. No blobs or spiky bits anywhere and its still just as shiney as when it was made.
Obviously they took the time to wash it in something like hexane before conformal coating to rid it of any flux residue, that when combined with heat, could cause corrosion and eventually a weapons malfunction, which could be incredibly bad. They probably used a lead alloy and sufficient flux (which can prevent spikes), and the conformal coating prevented oxidation.
I learned how to solder from highly skilled female wokers at Elbit. They assembled boards for the US, wirewrap, hand soldering, bundle ties with wax coated nylon. Many hours went into each board.
@@meercreate Yes. Hand cleaning and inspection to remove all flux, untill shiny.
@@meercreateFor similar work, the solvent was trichloroethylene. The solder was definitely lead based.
Wow, that brings back memories! I used to work at Hazeltine in Greenlawn as a QA rep from Boeing, inspecting boards that went in the first color AWACS displays, '85-'87. They were switching over to a new conformal coat back then, one that could be removed much easier to allow rework. The old one was too solid and attempted rework would destroy the fibers in the boards. They allowed smoking in the building, then wondered why ash kept getting caught between the boards and the coating! Perhaps they left off the conformal coat on the display area because they weren't sure of the longterm effect of UV through the panel on the coating?
When I saw Wargames, I was working in the Defense Support Program, AKA our country's only boost phase (detect on launch) missile warning capability at the time.
Some of us were a bit spooked and geeked out about the flick, but some details were also kinda... "oops that was laughable". Good flick, I'm gonna rewatch it soon.
If that is an EPROM then my first thought was a Finite State Machine based system, but it doesn't seem to have the usual latches and what not on the PCB. So maybe even some custom FSM based micro perhaps?
No Idea... but the architecture on the die sure looks like an EPROM.
Yes state machine, likely to drive display from a set of synchronous binary counters, and also probably used to do other decode complex logic as well. 6 input bits used to do display decode, and 5 bits of the output doing the display selecting, leaving 5 inputs spare and 3 bits as output to do other combinational logic. There will be some 4x4 bit memories there somewhere, used as scratch pad RAM, and then the rest of the Eprom will do the input data decode partly.
I notice the first board Fran pulled out had both 7474 and 5474 (early cmos version) flip-flops? I was wondering why the mix of standard and cmos chips, other than voltage ranges?
that is a custom IC chip carrier, use to make thin and thick film chips, and we would mount them in carriers similar to that, and then wire bond the pads to the legs...
It is very likely a custom logic, or maybe a GAL, or PAL.
@@FranLab I would also say, from the two symmetric halves and not too much room for logic at the sides and in the middle that this is an EPROM. I compared the layout with 2716 and 2732 from my collection from the time - I could imagine that it is a 2708 from the comparatively low density in the logic parts at the edges... www.decadecounter.com/vta/articleview.php?item=413
Imagine: You'll meet such lady who loves to hang out in my electronic lab disecting, repairing and understanding ;) Fran- love your videos!!!
Great tear down! Now just to plug it into your icbm system.
I love the traces on these old boards. it must have been an art form
It was an art form. Look at enough boards from the time and you will see true art.
It was and some of them were 10X faster than others with few errors. They could see 10 tracks ahead of the track they were laying. Using 4 to 6 layer boards. What 3D brains!
This is part of a radar install. Specifically, this display would display the IFF codes (transponder codes) of up to 4 targets. You could select an altitude level if there were more targets and get only readouts on the transponders at that particular level. That’s that the “intra target data” means.
Haven't seen Wargames but now I'll have to check it out. I remember the film coming out back in the day. I do remember taking military surplus stuff like this apart and it sure takes me back. The quality of the parts and assembly is trippy. Look at the machined metal bracket that the front of the display is mounted on. All pre CNC. The cost must have been insane. Heat discoloured epoxy board from 7400 TTL, that unit likely gobbled some real power. The amount of time and effort that went into designing and building the circuit boards... And I haven't seen the Texas Instruments logo for ages. That was just swell! And now that stuff is sold by the pound. To see this kind of assembly after seeing Chinese consumer crap held together by the handywork of some political dissident with a glue gun shows the two ends of the spectrum.
just discovered your channel and I'm already in love
I love your videos and your commentary, Fran :)
I’m guessing the eprom is being used as a look up table where inputs such as speed, time, coordinates etc can be used to address the eprom and the result displayed without the use of a cpu, kind of like a slide rule vs calculator.
I think it's being used as a micro-code "CPU" (this was before FPGA's) where the output pins are tied to gates to route data around some main bus. There are multi- and demultiplexers for taking data off the serial port then a whole bunch of flip-flops where the data (all 12-20 bytes apparently) is stored. Then the LED's tie into those flip flops to display it. A whole lot of space and circuitry for such a simple function, but welcome to the 70's.
Many years ago I worked for a company that made electronic devices for IBM. The dodgy wire link was considered at that time to be a normal repair / modification and after glued down to the PCB.
That is a fantastic piece of tech! I wish I could get my hands on it. Those ICs near the LED displays are Fairchild DM9368 7 segment drivers for common cathode LED displays. The data lines are 3v, outputs are 20mA at 1.7v and are set up to direct drive the segments. This would be fun to use a microcontroller to display some info on just to preserve the aesthetic. The drivers have 0-F (hexadecimal) characters in it, it's jut a matter of banging out the correct characters to display.
Thx for the wargames info...always welcome such stuff
This unit needs to go to Curious Marc asap! :-)
Yah and then get Mike involved. He probably knows everything about this little device and can launch a nuke from it.
Wow I started in the tech side of commercial radio in the late 1970s, this brings back memories of servicing stuff 👍
Aaaah, thanks Fran, this reminds me of my failures!
My mates left university with their degrees to go and design this sort of thing for satellite manufacturers and defence contractors.
I left university without a degree and went to work in a shop selling hifi. I made a slightly different career. I still wish I had worked hard at university, though. Still, I'd never have met my wife if I had.
My top three rewatched films of that style, in no particular order:
Wargames
The Manhattan Project
Real Genius
Yeah, I like all three of those too.
Just as the video was ending I was about to comment about how Wargames and The Manhattan Project are two 80s movies that go hand-in-hand. And those are both movies I haven't seen in way too long.
I'm shocked to see all that chip without bypass capacitor on power supply pins.. Very old design.
I built my first amateur radio repeater systems in the 1970’s. They used all 74xx series TTL and 555 timers for control. It was very similar to those boards. You could do almost anything with a 7400, depending how you connected up all the gates.
Really liked Wargames, and I've also watched it more times than I can remember. Still love it!
"I could talk about Wargames all live-long day"
PLEASE DO!! And upload it soon!!!