Enough of the fuckin Endless Bummer

*This was an email that I was writing, and just stopped and basically pasted in here and embedded videos in, so it's not super well formatted or anything.

This was probably the best explanation of core memory that actually made me understand it.

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The Connections Museum channel is fantastic to learn exactly how the phone switches work that
powered everything I grew up with.

This AT&T film goes into lots of other bonkers technologies that never really did anything like goddamn CRTs the size of your arm that read data in the range of "dozens of bits" from photo plates you'd slide in in front of the tube.

Less than 10 years later you have "affordable" fixed platter disks and 8" floppies, "Used DEC PDP's" and then Unix time started and it was pretty much Game Over from there.

Usagi Electric is another great one: https://www.youtube.com/@UsagiElectric

His series on the Bendix G15 computer from 1956 is particularly cool. But I like the terminals and DECs and Centurion stuff.

It's cool that he can compare flip flop cards from 9 years apart using original hardware from machines running 10 feet away.

I thought he had one from a couple years after the data620 too when everything started to "integrate" their "circuits".

These channels are retrocomputing taken to the extreme but also super understandable. At least the general mechanics of things. I don't understand the math or electronics behind any of it.

Tech Time Traveler is also very fun for the same reason. Early kit-based home computing and rarities. In particular though I have books written by Don Lancaster that I'm definitely going to read now because I now know who that is.

Fran Blanche, obviously. We have extremely similar tastes in clocks. I think I found her from a link from a friend about "green phthalate goop" in a power cord which I'd been dealing with.