TV Typewriter Redux

I’ve been an old computer collector for as long as I can remember. Even before they were old, they were unique – unique in look, unique in personality, unique in how they operated. In the early 1990s as it became clear the world was converging around the PC standard and computers were destined to become generic beige (later black) boxes; that and a little bit of nostalgia for my misspent youth prompted me to seek a few tokens of a disappearing age. In high school I remember the retirement of my school business office’s Commodore PETs, and asking if I might buy one. The PET had been the very first computer I had ever interacted with, as a Grade 1 student. It had been the computer I begged Santa for one Christmas (he responded with a VIC-20).

Anyway, back at the school, a teacher was piqued by my interest in those old Commodores, and was kind enough to secure one for me, free, fantastically enough. A SuperPET, with 8050 drive! A hobby (or more accurately: addiction) was born. I felt like that enthralled 6 year old again. Finally, a PET was mine!

For a good chunk of my early collecting days I had no idea what was really out there. Having been born in the mid-70s, I completely missed some of the earliest experimenting in home computing. My world was Atari, Commodore, IBM and so on.

That world was expanded considerably when the world wide web, and particularly Ebay came along. For the first time I found out that Commodore had produced something other than the PET, VIC-20, 64 and Amiga. I learned to my amazement of the TED series of machines, the C16 and Plus/4. The more I learned the more I wanted to learn. Collecting was made (relatively) easy by Ebay; you didn’t have to chance upon this stuff at a flea market or luck out at an estate sale. You just had to plug in the name of what you were looking for and, poof, there it was (or wasn’t)! It became a hobby in itself to learn about a new system and see if it was available for sale there.

But I digress.

Like I said, my world was the mainstream 8-bit stuff, like Commodore. Apple 1? What’s that? Mark-8? Is that a car? Altair? Never heard of her. I knew nothing of these and countless other efforts by early computing pioneers to break into the impenetrable fortress known as the Home.

Not that computers weren’t available if you really wanted one back then. They were just really expensive and of course the further back in time you go, the bigger a (ware)house you needed. In the early-to-mid 70s, most people had no practical use for a home computer. If they needed to do research, they picked up a book. If they needed entertainment, they hit the theatre. If they needed to type an essay, they had the trusty typewriter.

Some eager engineers had tried and failed (hard) to persuade people of the computer’s usefulness in the home – Honeywell with their hilarious Kitchen Computer springs to mind. Because you know, girls just wanna have fun (programming recipes in octal).

Between that apathy and the phenomenal cost of hardware, there seemed little chance for home computing. Enter Don Lancaster.

Don Lancaster was a talented engineer working for Goodyear Aerospace in the early 70s. He designed — not a computer, per se, but a thing he called a ‘TV Typewriter’. Don realized that one didn’t need to go out and purchase an ultra expensive video monitor to put text onscreen – in fact, most houses already had a monitor of sorts: their TV. The TV Typewriter would make use of what was already there and open the door to a flood of possibilities: “A super sales promoter! A calculator! A 32 register, 16 place serial computer!” Few of these would actually be realized, but the concept was critical in laying down the foundations of the 8 bit home computing revolution.

It didn’t have a CPU and could not be programmed. It couldn’t even allow you to do basic addition and subtraction like a calculator. Basically, it did exactly (and barely) what was advertised – it let you type stuff on your TV.

It was not a project for the faint of heart – although not nearly as expensive as a proper terminal of the day, it still cost some money and required some serious electronics assembly skills. Don’s prototype was a bargain basement as you got: a wood case covered in upholstery vinyl and a ‘surplus’ keyboard from a key-to-tape machine rejiggered for his purposes. The whole thing had a distinctly homespun feel. I soon realized, I had to have one!

But it was not to be. After years of searching I realized that with fewer than a couple hundred ‘kits’ sent out in total (Southwest Technical Products, an early computing pioneer, partnered with RE and offered a set of pre-fabbed boards the hobbyist could build a TVT from), many unsuccessfully built and likely tossed in the garbage (not to mentiom the passage of 40 years), there was little chance of my finding one online. The closest I ever got was a still pretty rare TV Typewriter II, which was a later design by Ed Colle that was a bit more packaged than the original. I’m really proud of that piece and look at it often, even though it no longer works correctly. (Update: it has been repaired!)

Digression again. So yeah, after concluding I would never likely come across an actual vintage ‘TV Typewriter’ in the wild, I realized, hey, I can do it myself! After all, that’s how it was done back in the day. And thus began my quest to create, from scratch, a recreation of the TV Typewriter. And since I’m recreating, why not make a replica of the original prototype? That would definitely attract some attention at vintage computing festivals!

I knew I would be able to find many of the correct vintage chips, some even period correct, with enough looking online. The boards could be recreated using copies of the artwork originally produced in the construction details booklet RE provided to readers for a fee. I fell in love with the whole idea the more I thought about this potential project – both as a means to acquire something that cannot be acquired, but also to go back in time, into the world of the early computing hobbyist and learn and invent just as they did. Even if I never got the thing to function (and that’s a strong probability; I’m a computer guy but I’m no engineer), at least I’d have it in my collection to show off. And anyway, lots of TVT builders in the day failed too. Failure is just as authentic as success!

The blog that follows will chronicle my efforts to build a ‘new’ TVT, a replica based on Don Lancaster’s original prototype. Get ready to giggle. This computer guy is about to get old-schooled.