Retro, yes, modifications... not so much.
These might interest some people though.
First up - a drum machine. Allen & Heath are better known for making audio mixers for live and studio use, but back in the early '80s, they had a shot at the computer age with a couple of products. One was a digital mixing/production setup, and the other was a totally new field for them - instruments. A "drum computer", that was designed to use easily loaded drum samples and be played with sticks using a 2 x 4 layout of pads.
Sound familiar? Roland's Octapad is like a tiny, lightweight, integrated version of that idea, but the Allen & Heath Brenel Inpulse One was developed around 1983 and hit the market at the end of '84, early '85. Those of you who are into music are already going "blah, Ensoniq, samplers, etc." and quite rightly, but AHB's little box was still pretty clever in concept.
For one, it loaded samples from tape, like an old home computer. Hook up a walkman, grab a cassette from the library, there's your drumkit loaded.
And two, it's built like a brick outhouse. This drum machine weighs 20Kg. A lot of that is due to using TTL logic, no ASICs here, and also having a chassis and PSU conceived by a firm that made mixing DESKS, literally. This was small for them. The end result is a machine that when it's not playing is deathly silent, no hum, noises, chirps or other nonsense. It also has individual outputs for each channel, trigger inputs (it was designed in part by a drummer, so playing it "properly" was important) and it has a very accessible programming interface that stacked up alongside contemporaries and classics, is pretty clever - it's got chained-pattern song, multi-song sophistication, 808-simplicity, and great control over dropped/delayed beats to sound less machine like.
In the end, at £1995 launch price and with a reputation for not liking being carried (roadies would load it into vans upside-down and because it was its own flight case, it was never protected - the chassis couldn't take that abuse), tape loading's wonderful idiosyncrasies (you're looking at 2 minutes to load a couple of seconds of sample and there's no monitoring of the signal), they sold around 140 of them before the Inpulse One was ended. Planned expansions for computer interface and sampling straight to the machine were dropped, though it did get a 256Kb RAM upgrade and MIDI interface.
AHB weren't the only audio firm to dabble with computers - one of the amp firms (HHB, I think, but google-fu is failing me today) tried to market a home computer. It also failed.
Anyway - enough rambling - I've owned two Inpulse One machines and my last one has sat in a corner for 5 years until this weekend, when I cracked it open, repaired the PSU, soldered in a new backup battery and got it mostly working - then sampled it and recovered the data from corrupted 30-year old "Sound Software" sample data tapes, using Audacity to rebuild the last three tricky samples by drawing what I recognised as pulses, but the computer couldn't detect when loading. Fun stuff.
geextreme.com/?page_id=851
The next project is something a little less interesting, but fascinating on a technical level.
Newspaper image gathering has always been quite impressive, tech-wise. We had telegraph-based wire transfers, cataloguing, captioning all pretty much in the bag by World War 1 - with improvements in speed and handling, and tech, that's much how it stayed until the 1980s. Wire transfer operators were the flipside to the manual typesetters, and both found their jobs pinched around the age of the microcomputer.
So in the mid '80s we have a race to improve upon/render obsolete the wire transfer as was. The main agencies are working their backsides off with camera/prescient digital imaging firms to make the tech do the job (the other side of this, is that the computer guys were doing cool stuff with imaging and UI in parallel). Our three horses in this race essentially boil down to:
Associated Press and Leaf/Scitex as some may know they became.
AfP (French press agency) and Hasselblad
And Nikon.
The arguments were, "digital or analogue" retrieval - transmission being determined by the need to get images to all manner of destinations, the old Wire Transfer CCITT AM/FM format being resilient, established and hard to kill off. Fax machines? Variant thereof, wire transfer of low quality for the home/office.
Hasselblad's solution became digital - and that's what I've got. Sold to a Derbyshire press agency in 1989/90, the system comprises two 80286 based industrial PCs called "Image Basket" and "Image Tuner", a slide scanner, and a couple of Dixel 2000 field units. The Dixel 2000 is a large briefcase that combines a small monochrome display, alphanumeric keyboard, 35mm slide scanner, digital and wire transfer modems, and these units were in the field from 1988 to 1995 typically. The images from the Troubles, and from the 1st Gulf War in Iraq, and from the RAC Rally, and from the obsessive tabloid reporting of Royal family breakdown in the early '90s? All provided by reporters lugging these heavy machines. I've been told of them being immersed in water, of them being bombed, and still working - one of mine works, the other one celebrated being asked to come out of retirement by exploding a capacitor on the PSU.
When new the system cost £22,000 per field unit and about £30-35,000 for the "Image Desk" itself.
There will be more on this later, but I'm trying to find ISA-era components - the Image Basket, I have got working again and will be imaging the SCSI drive to ensure a backup, the goal being to have it hooked up to the phoneline and once again send an image from the Dixel to the Image Basket. The Image Tuner was more sophisticated, and that one is causing me problems due to the lack of a multisync monitor of suitable flexibility. If anyone's interested in this though, I'll write more, and I will put some pictures up of the system.
Because of the way sending files, and printing, works, images were sent as CMYK separations - wire transfer couldn't do colour after all.
The first picture I recovered from the Image Basket, with the IPTC caption.
And the colour rendering. Yes. the machine just freezes to do this. The files are 2048 pixels wide.
These might interest some people though.
First up - a drum machine. Allen & Heath are better known for making audio mixers for live and studio use, but back in the early '80s, they had a shot at the computer age with a couple of products. One was a digital mixing/production setup, and the other was a totally new field for them - instruments. A "drum computer", that was designed to use easily loaded drum samples and be played with sticks using a 2 x 4 layout of pads.
Sound familiar? Roland's Octapad is like a tiny, lightweight, integrated version of that idea, but the Allen & Heath Brenel Inpulse One was developed around 1983 and hit the market at the end of '84, early '85. Those of you who are into music are already going "blah, Ensoniq, samplers, etc." and quite rightly, but AHB's little box was still pretty clever in concept.
For one, it loaded samples from tape, like an old home computer. Hook up a walkman, grab a cassette from the library, there's your drumkit loaded.
And two, it's built like a brick outhouse. This drum machine weighs 20Kg. A lot of that is due to using TTL logic, no ASICs here, and also having a chassis and PSU conceived by a firm that made mixing DESKS, literally. This was small for them. The end result is a machine that when it's not playing is deathly silent, no hum, noises, chirps or other nonsense. It also has individual outputs for each channel, trigger inputs (it was designed in part by a drummer, so playing it "properly" was important) and it has a very accessible programming interface that stacked up alongside contemporaries and classics, is pretty clever - it's got chained-pattern song, multi-song sophistication, 808-simplicity, and great control over dropped/delayed beats to sound less machine like.
In the end, at £1995 launch price and with a reputation for not liking being carried (roadies would load it into vans upside-down and because it was its own flight case, it was never protected - the chassis couldn't take that abuse), tape loading's wonderful idiosyncrasies (you're looking at 2 minutes to load a couple of seconds of sample and there's no monitoring of the signal), they sold around 140 of them before the Inpulse One was ended. Planned expansions for computer interface and sampling straight to the machine were dropped, though it did get a 256Kb RAM upgrade and MIDI interface.
AHB weren't the only audio firm to dabble with computers - one of the amp firms (HHB, I think, but google-fu is failing me today) tried to market a home computer. It also failed.
Anyway - enough rambling - I've owned two Inpulse One machines and my last one has sat in a corner for 5 years until this weekend, when I cracked it open, repaired the PSU, soldered in a new backup battery and got it mostly working - then sampled it and recovered the data from corrupted 30-year old "Sound Software" sample data tapes, using Audacity to rebuild the last three tricky samples by drawing what I recognised as pulses, but the computer couldn't detect when loading. Fun stuff.
geextreme.com/?page_id=851
The next project is something a little less interesting, but fascinating on a technical level.
Newspaper image gathering has always been quite impressive, tech-wise. We had telegraph-based wire transfers, cataloguing, captioning all pretty much in the bag by World War 1 - with improvements in speed and handling, and tech, that's much how it stayed until the 1980s. Wire transfer operators were the flipside to the manual typesetters, and both found their jobs pinched around the age of the microcomputer.
So in the mid '80s we have a race to improve upon/render obsolete the wire transfer as was. The main agencies are working their backsides off with camera/prescient digital imaging firms to make the tech do the job (the other side of this, is that the computer guys were doing cool stuff with imaging and UI in parallel). Our three horses in this race essentially boil down to:
Associated Press and Leaf/Scitex as some may know they became.
AfP (French press agency) and Hasselblad
And Nikon.
The arguments were, "digital or analogue" retrieval - transmission being determined by the need to get images to all manner of destinations, the old Wire Transfer CCITT AM/FM format being resilient, established and hard to kill off. Fax machines? Variant thereof, wire transfer of low quality for the home/office.
Hasselblad's solution became digital - and that's what I've got. Sold to a Derbyshire press agency in 1989/90, the system comprises two 80286 based industrial PCs called "Image Basket" and "Image Tuner", a slide scanner, and a couple of Dixel 2000 field units. The Dixel 2000 is a large briefcase that combines a small monochrome display, alphanumeric keyboard, 35mm slide scanner, digital and wire transfer modems, and these units were in the field from 1988 to 1995 typically. The images from the Troubles, and from the 1st Gulf War in Iraq, and from the RAC Rally, and from the obsessive tabloid reporting of Royal family breakdown in the early '90s? All provided by reporters lugging these heavy machines. I've been told of them being immersed in water, of them being bombed, and still working - one of mine works, the other one celebrated being asked to come out of retirement by exploding a capacitor on the PSU.
When new the system cost £22,000 per field unit and about £30-35,000 for the "Image Desk" itself.
There will be more on this later, but I'm trying to find ISA-era components - the Image Basket, I have got working again and will be imaging the SCSI drive to ensure a backup, the goal being to have it hooked up to the phoneline and once again send an image from the Dixel to the Image Basket. The Image Tuner was more sophisticated, and that one is causing me problems due to the lack of a multisync monitor of suitable flexibility. If anyone's interested in this though, I'll write more, and I will put some pictures up of the system.
Because of the way sending files, and printing, works, images were sent as CMYK separations - wire transfer couldn't do colour after all.
The first picture I recovered from the Image Basket, with the IPTC caption.
And the colour rendering. Yes. the machine just freezes to do this. The files are 2048 pixels wide.
But the Einstein was amazing. A while back someone was selling the one I didn't have - the 256 - on eBay as old stock they must have had from working at Tatung. Didn't get one, bad timing, but they were almost mythical when I was collecting.