So I was minding my own business watching the RF spectrum, when I got a spurious signal all
of a sudden. And at 100,000 Hertz exactly. I think it came from Russia. Putin must have been
annoyed that I hacked into his Soyuz clock, so he is hacking back into my equipment, and a few
other things in the US while he’s at it. Oh no, I take it back, he just wanted to tell me something.
Something’s up. I better check my newsfeed on the Teletype.
Yeah, yeah, I knew that already.
Oh, wait, there are more news.
Yes, that’s the big news, worthy of a teletype bell ring.
It looks like we reached 100,000 subs just before the end of the year!
Many many thanks to all that pressed the subscribe button.
This is rather unexpected. The channel started as a place to hold snippets of my R2-D2 build,
to illustrate my build log on Astromech.net. One day though, I bought a surplus vintage HP spectrum
analyzer, which of course failed, and started to film the repair,
in the hopes that someone would chime in and help out. Which is exactly what happened. So I continued to
document repairs of vintage HP equipment, making no effort to film then correctly.
I joined the Computer History Museum restoration team in 2014
and that added vintage computing to the mix.
I met Carl and Ken while I was at the museum, and we started to take on larger projects on our own:
the Xerox Alto, the Model 19 Teletype.
Mike Stewart joined us in 2018 and got us into the great Apollo Guidance Computer restoration
adventure, which actually even landed us into the news. So we added space stuff to the mix,
and then Soviet space stuff while we were at it.
And we got many other friends contributing to the channel,
like Antoine from France who got us into both extinct dinosaurs and extinct chips,
Bob Rosenbloom and his incredible collection, Mike Albaugh who ran FORTRAN on our mainframe,
and Lyle Bickley showing us the PDP-1, all of them incredible collectors and restorers.
Unfortunately we temporarily disbanded during the pandemic, which gave me an opportunity to
do smaller projects that had been on the blackburner for a while, but turned into
intense repair-a-thons, like the HP switcher power supply or the clock videos. So that
kept the channel going, and we crossed the 100,000 subscriber mark a day or two after Christmas day.
Thank you for all for all of you that subscribed, patronized,
or donated to the channel. It’s very motivating to have a faithful audience Iike this.
I can’t wait that we can get back all together as a complete team, as we have many space items,
spy soviet stuff and big iron computer projects waiting for us in the pipeline. Thank you all for
your support, and see you in the next episode in a year 2021 that can only be better! See you soon!