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CDV-700 Civil Defence Geiger Counter 1960 - 68

This is the classic Geiger Counter that has featured in countless movies and TV programs over the years. Although the design is more than 50 years old it is still seen from time to time in current productions, including recent episodes of NCIS. I always have a little chuckle when I see one on the screen as it is usually accompanied by a 'ticking' sound as our hero or heroine locates a radioactive source. In fact they have no built in speaker, just a really weird and long obsolete headphone socket but the point is, it looks the part.

 

They were first produced in the early 1960s, at the height of the cold war. Hundreds of thousands of them were made for the US Civil Defense Corps, to be kept in fallout shelters and issued in the aftermath of a nuclear attack. Several different models were made and the manufacturing was contracted out to specialist companies, including Electo-Neutronics Inc (ENI), Universal Atomics, Victoreen, Anton and Lionel, the latter being better known to many Americans as a maker of toy trains.

 

The CDV-700 was the most sensitive model; it uses a Geiger Muller tube and can easily detect low levels of background radiation up to lethal doses. Other models, like the CDV-715 and 717 were only capable of sensing very high levels and if you ever saw the needle move on one of those you were probably going to die...

 

No expense was spared in their design and construction. They were built to last; those that survived mostly still work, or can be easily bought back to life as the electronic circuitry is very simple (most had just two or three transistors). They run off standard 'D', type torch batteries that last for several weeks in continuous use. The Geiger tube is housed in the detachable probe handle and it has a clever rotating shield that allows the user to discriminate between Beta (nasty but doesn't travel very far) and Gamma (really bad and gets through almost anything) radiation. It was meant to be easy to use and came with an instruction manual that could be understood by untrained personnel. Calibration was simple, on the side of the unit is a 'Check Source' label containing a small piece of radioactive material (Radium D/E or Lead 210) and when the probe is bought close to it, the meter on the top can be adjusted to give the correct reading. Over the years the radioactive material has decayed - the half-life of the source is around 22 years -- so they are no longer reliable but there's still enough activity enough to give a decent reading.

 

What Happened To It?

CDV Geiger Counters, Survey Meters and dosimeters were produced throughout the 1960s and the stocks were scrupulously maintained - regularly tested and recalibrated -- until the mid 1990s when they were gradually phased out. Local and Federal government bodies auctioned off stocks and many of them ended up in private hands, schools and colleges, which is where I come in. A few years a go I bought up a few CDV-700s, mostly 'as new' unissued stock, which I have been steadily selling off on my anythingradioactive web site. Sadly they are coming to an end now but you can still find them on ebay in the US. The only problem is they are quite heavy and the shipping costs can be prohibitive, moreover in some states the export is banned, probably due to the radioactive check source labels. 

 

The great thing about CDV 700s is that they are a practical gadget and (mostly) still work. You would be surprised how much radioactivity there is out there, everything from the hands and dials on old watches and clocks with luminous hands (radium paint was used up until the 1950s), glassware and porcelain that uses uranium tints and glazing, old gas mantles (doped with thorium to increase brightness) and even granite kerbstones which can contain traces of naturally occurring uranium ore.

 

I doubt that you will see very many of them here in the UK but if you do, it's not a silly price and it still works grab yourself a little piece of Cold War history.


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                        1960

Original Price                   £ unknown

Value Today?                   £30 - 100, depending on condition

Features:                          Single switch off x100, x10 & x1 range, detachable probe with beta shield, carry strap, water-resistant case, three range settings, covering 0 - 0.5, 0 - 5 and 0 - 50 mR/h (millirontgens per hour), check source label, high impedance headphone

Power req.                       2 or 4 D cells (depending on make)

Weight:                            1.5kg ex batteries

Dimensions:                     120 x 210 170

Made in:                           USA

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):     7


Oric Atmos Home Computer, 1984

Back in the early 1980s I worked on one of the UK’s first computer magazines (Computing Today). I clearly recall the late night and overnight sessions in the office when exciting new models came in for review. I don’t think anyone went home for two days when the Commodore PET appeared.

 

It was a mad time and new computers were coming out of the woodwork; during peak times there could be two or three new models a week. Inevitably most of them disappeared without trace, usually after a year or so, deservedly so in many cases. Far too many of those early machines were launched in haste; they were often buggy, poorly made, lacked software support or were just another dull me-too product. A few – very few – deserved better and in my opinion one of the models that should have gone on to bigger and better things was the Oric Atmos. It looked like a professional product, made in a factory and not someone’s garden shed; it had a proper keyboard, proper connection to the outside world, a whopping 64k of RAM (there was also a 16k model but it was next to useless), decent sound that included several built-in effects, and the price was quite reasonable.

 

What Happened to it?

No prizes for guessing, there were a fair few games for the Atmos but nothing on the scale of the ones being written for the likes of Spectrum, Atari and Commodore machines. Back then games were all that mattered, and although some for the Atmos were very good, in general they weren’t the slick and hugely popular headline grabbers that made the other machines so successful. One of the reasons I liked the Atmos so much was the keyboard and the fact that it could be so easily coupled up to a printer and disc drive. There was even a couple of half-decent word processors. Sadly this was not enough to sustain the machine and the makers, Oric International, went into receivership in 1985.

 

My Atmos was an early review sample; for a few months it had a fair bit of use but something newer and shinier must have come alone, it was put back into its box and has remained in my loft ever since. My guess is it still works but for some reason the power supply has disappeared, along with a small collection of program cassettes. This neatly illustrates one of the majpor pitfalls of collecting old PCs; they really need to work and you must have a supply of software to make it worthwhile. Nevertheless, it’s an undeveloped market, especially for more obscure models like this, which can often be found very cheaply, but more than anything else, they are a little bit of history and played a very important part in the development of the personal computer; who knows, one day they could become quite valuable…


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                         1984

Original Price                   £170

Value Today?                   £25

Features:                          6502A processor, 48k RAM, 16k ROM, 200 x 240 pixel display (text 28 line/40 characters), 8 foreground  & 8 background colours, QWERTY keyboard, TV/UHF display output, cassette interface, printer, Expansion & RGB ports, sound: 15Hz - 62 KHz (7 Octaves) 3 channels + 4 sound effects (explode, ping, shoot, zap)

Power req.                       7 volt DC  (supplied mains adaptor)

Weight:                            0.8kg

Dimensions:                     280 x 180 x 55 mm

Made in:                          UK

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):    6


Yamaha PortaSound PC-100, 1981,

I’m not especially musical and can just about manage a few fumbling chords on a guitar, but for a brief period back in the early 1980s I was quite the keyboard virtuoso. My repertoire wasn’t very extensive, but plonk me in front of a piano and I could rattle out a fair rendition of Saturday Night Fever, Greensleeves and Aloha Oe

 

It was all thanks to the Yamaha PortaSound PC-100, which I was reviewing for a short-lived technology magazine that I used to edit, called Next… Those three tunes and a dozen or so others were provided with the keyboard, which used the innovative Playcard system. The tunes were coded into a magnetic strip that ran along the bottom edge of the card, which also had the notation and words, for those that could actually read music. The card was ‘swiped’ in a slot along the top panel, which programmed the keyboard to play the tune, but here’s the clever bit. An LED lit up next to each note as it was played and if you selected the ‘Free Tempo’ mode all you had to do to learn a tune was to hit each key as it lit up, and this also controlled the speed or tempo. Nowadays this system is old hat but back then it was nothing short of revolutionary. It really worked too, and as you got more proficient you could go solo and switch off the lights.

 

Needless to say it doesn’t actually teach you to play a keyboard instrument, just to memorise tunes parrot fashion, though I have to say that after digging it out of the loft and trying it again, and after a gap of more than 20 years, not only did the PC100 and most of the Playcards still work, my Saturday Night Fever still wasn’t half bad…

 

What Happened To It?

Yamaha had high hopes for the Playcard System and I seem to remember there was even talk of it becoming a standard format for keyboard instruments. Clearly that never happened and apart form anything else, magnetic stripes can and do wear out. A couple of my cards are too dog-eared to play now and solid state storage devices do a much better job but many of the features in this keyboard have gone on to bigger and better things. The fact that it still works says a lot about the build quality of these devices, it also helps that it came with a sturdy rigid carry case.

 

By today’s standards it is very basic and the range of instruments (which all sound a bit samey) and effects are quite limited but back then home keyboards were still a novelty, and quite expensive. As a result I don’t think many of them were sold, and I suspect they had fairly short lives so this sort of thing is probably quite rare but not especially valuable. It’s unlikely to become a serious collectable but they’re fun to have around so if you see one going cheap, and it’s a runner, grab it, you never know…


 

GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                         1981

Original Price                   £350

Value Today?                   £25

Features:                          10 rhythms, 10 instruments, auto bass chord, arpeggio, Playcard system, variable tempo, trasnposer, sustain

Power req.                        9 – 12 volt DC, (6 x C cells or supplied mains adaptor)

Weight:                            2kg

Dimensions:                     600 x 180 x 35 mm

Made in:                          Japan

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):    5


Psion Organiser II XP, 1986

It hardly seems possible that the Psion Organiser is now almost a quarter of a century old, and it is difficult to overstate just how important a milestone it was in the development of personal computers. This is literally where it all began, for generations of pocket computers, PDAs, organisers and smartphones.

 

By current standards it’s laughably crude, the Pison II was based on an 8-bit Hitachi processor running at just 0.9MHz. It came with 32kB of ROM and a choice of 8, 16, 32 or 64k RAM and featured a simple 2-line LCD display, yet this small box of tricks with its calculator type keyboard was nothing short of revolutionary. Today’s programmers would be amazed at how many functions were squeezed into such a modest device.

 

It came with a built-in alarm clock, calendar, calculator and databank, but the killer feature was OPL or the Organiser Programming Language, which meant anyone with a modicum of programming skills, could develop applications for it; there was even a simple word processor. Two slots on the back were for expansion ROM/PROM cartridges or Datapaks and there’s a RS232 port on the top, which could be used to connect the Psion II to a host of external devices, from printers and telephone diallers to barcode scanners. The latter made it particularly popular with business users, for stock control and so on and Marks and Spencer were early and enthusiastic users.

 

What Happened to it?

Quite simply it evolved, the Psion II was always a bit specialist and it’s appeal was a bit limited for the average Joe, if only because it was so groundbreaking, but the big breakthrough came in 1989 with the launch of the MC400, followed by the Series 3 and 5 models, which look like proper pocket computers, complete with larger screens and QWERTY type keyboards.

 

This one costs me just £12 and I found it gathering dust in the corner of Brighton Junk shop, complete with a full set of manuals. It's in great condition and it works too, and the LCD screen would put some of today’s notebooks to shame for legibility, especially in bright sunlight. There’s still a few enthusiasts out there using them, and plenty of links on the web for downloading software, applications and even a few games, so unlike many early computers this one can still be used, and it’s a guaranteed scene-stealer in the office or down the pub, the next time some smart Alec hikes out their latest shiny smartphone.


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                        1986

Original Price                   £139

Value Today?                   £10-20

Features:                          2-line 6cm LCD screen, 16k RAM, 2 memory cartridge slots, slide cover, diary, alarm clock, data bank, calculator, RS232 port,

Power req.                        9V PP£ battery

Weight:                             300g

Dimensions:                      78 x 145 x 30mm (whd)

Made in:                           UK

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):     5


Amstrad CPC 464 Colour, 1984

Credit for kick-starting the personal computer revolution in the UK during the late 1970s and early 80s usually goes to Clive Sinclair with his range of ZX machines. I’m not about to dispute that, but Sinclair’s undoubted popularity tends to overshadow the huge contributions made by other manufacturers, including of course Amstrad.

 

Alan Sugar’s particular talent was to cut through the crap and deliver affordable, well thought out products that mostly worked fairly well. The CPC 464 was a prime example, whilst other PC manufacturers had you messing around with optional cassette decks, TV modulators and lots of tangly cables Amstrad’s offering came with the tape deck built in, and its own dedicated colour (or mono green screen) monitor, so you didn’t have to tie up the family TV. That was a really big deal because back then most households only had one telly. You could even buy an adaptor that turned the Amstrad monitor into a TV, now that was something!

 

The CPC 464 was nothing special in computing terms, it was based on the ubiquitous Zilog Z80 processor that most other PCs at the time were using, it ran at 40MHz, there was a useful 42kb of user RAM a\available and it had decent graphics and audio facilities, plus a good assortment of ports for peripherals. It’s main selling point, though was that it attracted a lot of interest from the games companies so there was a really good selection of software available, which helped it to sell over 2 million units in the 6 years it was in production.

 

I have to admit that back then I wasn’t a fan, I was into the more versatile Commodore and Atari products, but I can see the appeal of the 464 and looking back at it now it’s easy to see why it was so successful.

 

I picked this one up at a flea market in Brighton and it cost me £10, for another tenner I could have ad the monitor as well, though the chap selling it was fairly certain it wasn’t working, and I had my hands full. It’s in pretty good shape and it still boots up, though I haven’t got around to getting hold of any programs so a full test run will have to wait.

 

What Happened to it?

The CPC 464 went the way of all non-PC home computers, by the late 1980s the IBM PC and Microsoft’s DOS operating system had begin their takeover of the computer market. Amstrad went on to build PCs as well but nor before they’d had a successful run with their classic PCW word processor. Sinclair, Commodore, Atari, Tandy and many others limped on to the mid 80s but the open licensing of the IBM design, which allowed just about anyone to set up business as a computer manufacturer, and the standardisation of Microsoft’s operating system wiped out most of the competition (Apple being the only notable exception), Although a lot of CPC 464s were made my guess is that most of them ended up in skips, but they’re by no means rare and they turn up regularly on ebay and in car boot sales for a few pounds. They could become collectable one day but I suggest that you go for a pristine working example, with a monitor and plenty of software.

 


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                         1984

Original Price                   £400

Value Today?                   £10

Features:                          Zilog Z80 8-bit CPU, 64kb RAM, 16kb video RAM, 640 x 200 (2 colour), 320 x 200 (4 colour)  160 x 200 (16 colour), 3-channel sound, Ports: printer, bus, joystick, floppy, monitor, headphone, power, built-in cassette deck

Power req.                        5 volts DC (external mains adaptor)

Weight:                             2.5kg

Dimensions:                     570 x 65 x 165mm (whd)

Made in:                           Korea

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):    2


 

Giant Light Bulbs 1960/70?

No, I don’t collect light bulbs, that would just be weird, though I do seem to have accumulated a few but in my defence they are wonderful looking objects and I didn’t seek them out, they found me…

 

The bulbs in question are not your common or garden variety, they’re huge, between 5 and 10 times the size of your typical 60 watter and as you can see from the photograph, these two examples are a good deal bigger than the current crop of energy saving jobbies.

 

Unfortunately I have little inkling what they’re for. They’re industrial quality and I suspect meant for street lighting, floodlights or some such. I would like to think the one on the right is from a lighthouse, but I honestly have no idea. They tend not to have much in the way of markings on them, maybe just a model number, though the one on the right does have the maker’s name – GEC England, the light output – 5000 watts, and what I presume is the voltage – 110-120. 

 

I’m fascinated by their construction, real ship in a bottle stuff, with their ornate webs of filaments, and huge insulators and connectors and judging from the materials and design, I am guessing – and it really is only a guess – these were made some time from the 1960s onwards. I’ve been tempted once or twice to hook them up to a power supply and see what happens but without more data I haven’t the nerve, or the inclination to blow fuses. The two shown here turned up in a box of glass chemical apparatus bought at a large antiques fair in Surrey, I think I paid around £10 for the lot. Others have come in boxes of valves and other old electronic wizwangs that I come across from time to time.

 

What happened to them?

For all that I know bulbs like these are still being manufactured. I’m not aware of any major advances in lighting technology at this end of the scale and I can’t see a bunch of LEDs or compact fluorescents being suitable for the kind of applications I imagine these were designed for. I really don’t know and one day I must look into the whole subject. There seems to be a small but thriving community of serious collectors on the web (http://electriclights.tripod.com/bulbs.htm), though most of them appear to be interested in collecting consumer light bulbs. But it really doesn’t matter. They’re totally useless and I have no idea what, if anything, they’re worth but they are great things to have, provided it’s not your job to keep them dusted and polished…


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                         1960s onwards

Original Price                   unknown but probably very expensive

Value Today?                   £5 - £50, who knows?

Features:                          They glow and probably get very hot…

Power req.                        Left: 110 – 120

Weight:                             Left: 0.8kg

Dimensions:                     140mm dia bulb  x 270mm

Made in:                           England

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):     7


 

Philips Electronic Engineer Kit EE8, 1963

I vividly recall the initial excitement at receiving a Philips Electronics Engineer kit for a birthday present, probably in 1964. It was one of those must-have toys for boys, though calling it a toy is a little unfair. It was aimed at the early teenage market and was on a par with chemistry sets, which back then were actually quite dangerous and contained all sorts of dodgy chemicals. Not that the Philips EE kits were in any way dangerous but the illustration on the box was in no doubt that mastery of the kit was a big step towards becoming knob-twiddling boffin, fighter pilot or radio astronomer.

 

Sadly the reality was a little different. I had by then become reasonably accomplished at building simple electronics circuits from plans in magazines and the kit’s offerings were rather tame, to say the least. There were 22 ‘projects’ in all, which included one and two transistor radios that never worked, a Morse key trainer, gramophone amplifier, flashing light, automatic night light and a rain and moisture sensor. Nevertheless, it was good fun and the main feature was that you could build an electronic circuit then tear it down and build something else.

 

Unlike other electronic educational toys of the day you actually got to play with real components, I seem to remember most of the other kits had the parts safely sealed inside little transparent plastic boxes. The downside was that the more delicate components were easily damaged and resistors and capacitors soon lost their connecting wires through repeated bending.

 

The kit’s design was really clever; a thin card overlay, showing the position of the components and their interconnections is placed over a perforated peg-board. You popped spring connectors through the holes and inserted the components. Sometimes the projects actually worked, though problems with broken wires and intermittent contacts meant that the failure rate was high. Nevertheless, this encouraged you track down the fault, which was probably more educational than building the thing in the first place.

 

What Happened to It?

I am not sure when Philips finally pulled the plug on the EE series of kits but several Dutch websites mentions kits being made as recently as 2002. Their heyday, though, was undoubtedly in the 60s and early 70s, when an interest in electronics wasn’t considered nerdy and this was just before computers and video games came along, killing interactive, educational and hands-on practical products like this one stone dead. It’s a great pity because several generations have now grown up without the faintest idea about what goes on inside all of the electronic gadgets and widgets they’re buying, or the simple pleasure of building something that (might) actually work and do something.

 

Needless to say I bought this kit from ebay and it was identical to the one I owned back them. The box and polystyrene container are very well used but it is around 90 percent complete, which is amazing considering that it appears to have been very well played with. I was thrilled to find it still had the original transistors and light dependant resistor (LDR) which in my opinion was the most exciting thing in the box. This was the core component in a light-operated switch, a genuinely amazing feat of technology back then. I paid a little over £30 for it but if you want one in pristine condition you can expect to pay nearer £100, but for me condition isn’t important, it looks as feels just like the one I used to own. It’s pure nostalgia, and if I can get hold of a couple of those flat 4.5 volt ‘lantern’ batteries, I’ll see if I can get that 2 transistor radio to finally work…  


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                        1963

Original Price                   £20

Value Today?                   £20 - £50

Features:                          22 projects, key components: 2 x germanium transistors, 1 x germanium diode, tuning capacitor, loudspeaker, crystal earphone, ferrite rod aerial, light dependant resistor, choke, resistors, capacitors, potentiometer, miniature light bulb, heat sink, building board

Power req.                        2 x 4.5 volt lantern batteries

Weight:                             1.0kg

Dimensions:                      (box) 360 x 260 x 60mm

Made in:                            Holland

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):      7


Cambridge Z88 Notebook Computer 1987

In the world of computing the current flavour of the month is small notebooks, or ‘netbook’ PCs, weighing less than 1kg. They save space and weight by using solid-state memory and plug-in memory modules instead of a hard drive. They mostly run specialised operating systems (proprietary versions of Linux) that load quickly and they come bundled with office software suites and usually manage to run for several hours, between charges.

 

What goes around comes around and over twenty years ago Sir Clive Sinclair launched a compact notebook PC, called the Cambridge Z88. It had an A4 footprint, weighed less than 1kg, came with a suite of office applications, used solid state memory instead of a hard drive, data and software are stored on plug-in memory expansion modules, it comes on more or less instantly and runs for a whopping 20 hours on a set of standard 4AA batteries

 

Okay, so some things have improved and the Z88 screen is a touch narrow. In fact it can only display 8-lines of text, though you would be surprised how easy it is to use for routine tasks like word processing, though it could be difficult to read in some lighting conditions. Otherwise it really is quite civilised; the rubber keyboard is actually very good and there’s a proper serial port so it can communicate with other PCs, printers and modems.

 

The Z88 had a chequered history. The original idea, back in the early 1980s was to develop a portable version of the hugely popular Spectrum, but by the mid 80s this had evolved into a portable computer called Pandora, which then, after a number of revisions became the Z88. But by that time Sinclair Research was in dire financial straits, thanks largely to the ill-fated C5 electric vehicle and the computer division was sold to Amstrad. In 1986 Clive Sinclair formed Cambridge Computers and the Z88 was finally unveiled to the press in February 1987.

 

It was an instant hit and I bought this very one soon after the launch for the not inconsiderable sum of £300 (I also bought several EPROM memory modules and an UV ‘eraser’ device, so they could be re-used). This machine proved ideal for press trips and I must have wrote hundreds of articles on it during long flights and sleepless nights in distant hotel rooms. It has probably been around the world several times and it never failed me once. Much to my astonishment after lying dormant in my loft for at least 10 years, it powered up first time!

 

What Happened To It?

Production finally came to an end in 1989 but in that relatively short time thousands were sold and believe it or not, there is a hardy band of enthusiasts still using them. Over the years there’s been a steady stream of software and hardware upgrades but by the late 80s Cambridge Computers was in trouble again, the company was sold and Sir Clive turned his attention to electrically powered bikes. Without further development it was doomed and in any case the Z88 was being overtaken by portable and laptop PCs that by then were becoming smaller, and cheaper, and more capable. Nevertheless it would take until the late 90s before really small computers, like the Toshiba Libretto, came anywhere near matching the Z88 for size, weight and portability.  

 


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                        1987

Original Price                   £230

Value Today?                   £50

Features:                          Zilog Z80 processor, 128kb ROM, 32kb static RAM, (expandable to 3.5Mb), ‘OZ’ operating system, Pipedream word processor/spreadsheet, database, diary, calendar, calculator, alarm, file manager, data terminal, print manager, BASIC, 640 x 64 pixel LCD display, built in speaker

Power req.                        4 x AA cell (mains adaptor supplied)

Weight:                             0.8kg

Dimensions:                      293 x 207 x 24 mm

Made in:                            England

Hen's Teeth (10 rarest):      6


Staticmaster Polonium 210 Anti-Static Brush 1978

Here’s a truly weird, wonderful and rather appropriate gadget from the late 1970s with some bizarre contemporary connections. It’s an anti-static brush, used to de-dustify things like vinyl records and photographic film.

 

So far so ordinary, but there’s a few things about the Staticmaster that makes it rather interesting. Firstly it’s radioactive, that’s right, if you look closely, just behind the bristles you can see a small grating with some brown material deposited on the surface.

 

This is the radioactive element and it creates a ‘field’ of ionised particles up to an inch or two ahead of the bristles and this has the effect of neutralising the static charge that makes dust stick to surfaces.

 

Here’s the second surprise, the radioactive material used in the brush is none other than Polonium 210, the same stuff used in the recent horrific poisoning incident that resulted in the death of the Russian ex-KGB agent Alexander Litvinenko.

 

Polonium 210 emits alpha particles. These are very weak and cannot penetrate skin so they are relatively ‘safe’ in the contained environment of the brush head. It is also significant that Polonium 210 has a half life of 139 days, which basically means that virtually all of the radioactivity disappears within a couple of years of manufacture, as the polonium turns into an inert isotope of lead, so these old brushes are now completely harmless.

 

The alpha particles emitted by Polonium 210 become dangerous when ingested into the body in liquid form or in very fine particles in quite significant qualities so before you ask, you would need a great many brushes, some pretty sophisticated equipment and very specialised knowledge to create anything dodgy from them.

 

What Happened to It?

Here’s another surprise, they’re still being made, and this is the only legal way you can obtain Polonium 210. The brush shown here was made in 1978 by a US company called Nuclear Products. Nowadays they are manufactured, along with a wide range of industrial and consumer anti-static products by Amstat Industries.

 


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                         1965

Original Price                   £8.00

Value Today?                   £2

Features:                          Radioactive anti-static brush  
Power req.                        n/a

Weight:                             100g

Dimensions:                     125 x 30 x 20 mm

Made in:                            USA

Hen’s Teeth (10 rarest):   1


Seiko EF302G Voicememory 1980

This rather uninspiring object is what I believe to be one of the very first examples of a solid stage digital audio recorder, in other words a very distant relative of today’s microchip based MP3 players. Not that you could use this particular device to record many tunes, in fact the maximum storage capacity was a paltry 8 seconds, at the lowest quality, and 4 seconds at the higher setting, and both are pretty dire. Nevertheless, it was quite something back then and it’s the technology we are concerned with. Don’t forget this was at a time when the only way for the average Joe to record their voice was to use a tape recorder. The analogue clock is a nice touch, sadly it’s not coupled to the voice memo but it does have an alarm that bleeps at the appointed hour

 

Inside the unit, which is the size and shape of a standard telephone handset, there’s a chunky loudspeaker and microphone and on a densely packed circuit board there’s at least half a dozen microchips.

 

To illustrate just how far this technology has progressed I recently picked up a voice recorder built into the top of a pen. It had a single microchip, microscopic speaker/mike and a 1-minute recording time, which probably doesn’t sound a lot after 20 years of development, but it was purchased from my local ‘Pound ‘ shop, which basically means it cost next to nothing to make

 

What Happened To It?

Solid state voice memory recorders have been around for at least the last 15 years but these days apart from cheapie widgets and novelties that turn up in gadget shops and gizmo catalogues this type of stand-alone device is virtually redundant. Voice recording hasn’t gone away, though, it’s just moved on to bigger and better things and it is now a secondary feature in a wide range of other devices, everything from mobile phones to personal organisers now have memos recorders.


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                  1980

Original Price             £60

Value Today?             £10

Features:                    analogue clock with alarm, 4/8 second audio memory, 3-stage volume

Power req.                  23 x AAA

Weight:                       100g

Dimensions:               195 x 60 x 35 (very approx)

Made in:                      Japan

Rarity:                         7(1 = common, 10 = Hen's teeth)


Bio Activity Translator, 1979

I’m guessing that few dustygizmos visitors will have seen one of these before since so few of them were ever built. It’s a Jeremy Lord Bio Activity Translator, a device that converts the tiny electrical impulses generated by all living organisms, into sounds. It was part of a brief fad for hooking plants and small creatures up to electronic devices in an effort to communicate with them or try and understand what they were saying...

 

Don’t laugh, there is something to it, and if you change a plant’s environment, by varying the amount of water and light it gets then the impulses it generates will change. Similarly, if you shake the plant, or cut off a leave you will get another, usually more strident type of reaction, which some advocates of the ‘technology’ took to indicate shock or pain.

 

This particular device was sold in kit form, for around £18.95, which was a fair sum almost 30 years ago, and it was quite a challenge to build with dozens of components to solder onto a printed circuit board. Basically it’s a very sensitive amplifier, connected via various filtering circuits to a voltage-controlled oscillator that makes all the noises. It has a built-in speaker, or you can connect it up to your hi-fi system, to really hear your vegetation scream! It’s battery powered and there are just two connections, one to a spike that goes into the soil, the other is a conductive pad in a spring clip that attaches to a leaf. Just switch it on and tease you plant and you’ll be rewarded with a string of notes that were mostly quite annoying though to be fair on occasions it could be quite tuneful. 

 

What happened to it?

Bioactivity remains a very active area of research but its application in home entertainment was always going to be limited, not least because most plants are not that melodic. Similar devices have popped up from time to time and perhaps with the current resurgence of interest in greenery and plant welfare it may be time for a revival.

 


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                   1979

Original Price              £18.95 (supplied in kit form)

Value Today?              £50

Features:                     voltage controlled amplifier and envelope modulated pulse generator, coupled to a voltage-controlled oscillator

Power req.                   2 x 4.5 volt cycle lamp batteries

Weight:                        700g

Dimensions:                198 x 145 x 86mm (very approx)

Made in:                      Jeremy Lord Synthesisers, London SW16

Rarity:                          9 (1 = common, 10 = Hen's teeth)


Stylophone 1967

No collection of 60s and 70s technology would be complete without a Stylophone. It was invented in 1967 by British pianist Brian Jarvis who along with brothers Bert and Ted Coleman formed a company called Dubreq to manufacture them. By the time the craze fizzled out in the late 70s some 3-million had been sold.

 

It was basically a monophonic -- you could only play one note at a time -- electronic organ, played by moving a wired ‘stylus’ across a printed metal keyboard, completing a simple circuit. The sound was very distinctive, especially with the ‘vibrato’ switched on, and it famously featured on several 70s pop hits, including David Bowie’s Space Oddity. For most of the time it was on sale it was associated with Rolf Harris, who helped to launch it on his TV show and made several records featuring the instrument.

 

Only two models were ever produced, the ‘Pocket’, shown here (also available in white and brown) and the larger and more advanced 350S, though there were countless copies and clones made in the Far East. When it first went on sale it cost an amazing £8 18s 6d (eight pounds, eighteen shillings and sixpence, or around £8.92) which is more than £100 at today’s prices.  This one is in fairly average condition, found on ebay a few years ago for £10, but it did come in its original box. Nowadays a really pristine example could set you back £100 or more but it is still possible to buy Stylophones for between £55 and £150; these are the real deal, made in the 70’s either refurbished or ‘New’ old stock that for some reason was never sold.  

 

What Happened to it?

It was basically a toy and this is a remarkably fickle market; musical tastes also change very quickly and the Stylophone ‘sound’ became passé. The development of much more sophisticated electronic instruments also played a part in its eventual demise; first generation synthesisers were just starting to appear at this time and the Stylophone’s limited repertoire sealed its doom. Every so often it is rediscovered and several contemporary bands have dabbled with it. Stylophones will always be a popular collectable, however, and if you want to find out more, maybe buy one or just relive that rich distinctive sound then pop along to the Stylophone collector’s web site 


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                   1967

Original Price              £8 18s 6d

Value Today?              £50

Features:                     Single octave keyboard, 4-transistor oscillator/amplifier, internal speaker, amplifier output, volume control (later models)

Power req.                   single 9v PP3

Weight:                        300g

Dimensions:                158 x 40 x 100 (very approx)

Made in:                      UK )

Rarity:                          7 (1 = common, 10 = Hen's teeth)


AlphaTantel Prestel Terminal 1979

It is said that there’s nothing new under the Sun and this little box dating from very early 1980s proves it, as far as data communications are concerned. A good ten years before the Internet went public it was possible to download information, software and play games through a phone line and display it on a TV or monitor screen.

 

Prestel or ViewData as it was generically known was developed by the British Post Office in the 1970s. It was an interactive video text system, loosely based on Teletext technology, sharing the same 40 x 24 text character display format.

 

Prestel users had to pay a subscription to access information and a number of journalists (and I was one of them) were recruited by ‘IPs' or Information Providers to generate the content for the system. This ranged from the latest news and stock information to simple games, technology articles (my department) and buyer’s guides. Prestel could also be used to send messages to other subscribers -- early email -- there were forums and what we would now call chat lines and users could even upload their own personal pages (forerunners of YouTube, MySpace)

 

The AlphaTantel unit here was used to input and upload material to IP via the main server computer in London; this was then edited and  ‘mirrored’ on a number of regional servers on a network that is uncannily similar to the Internet (albeit on a much smaller scale).

 

As you can see it has a crude calculator style keyboard and entering more than a few lines of text was a long and tedious business. On the plus side it was quite easy to use and all it needed was a mains connection and a telephone socket (old style multi-way jack); the TV connected to a aerial socket on the back or if you were really flash you could use a monitor as it has an RGB output socket. It had a built-in modem, which dialled up the server and established the connection at a blistering 1200 baud. There was also a printer port and a DIN socket for connecting the unit to an audio cassette recorder, for recording data.

 

What Happened to it?

Quite simply the Post office and the various IPs were greedy and priced it out of business. Substantial hardware costs and subscription charges were on top of normal call rates when you were online, so you had to be fairly well off, especially if the call involved a long distance connection. On top of that most IPs charged by the page, up to 99 pence in some cases (and that was when a quid was worth something…).

 

Prestel hung around for around 10 years and the Post Office finally closed it down in 1991, not that anyone noticed. Nevertheless, this now forgotten technology laid the foundations of the Internet and the next time you hear about some whizzy new web feature there is a fair chance that Prestel was doing it twenty years ago.


GIZMO GUIDE

First seen:                   1979

Original Price              £200

Value Today?              £100

Features:                     QWERTY keyboard, built-in 1200/75 baud modem, 15-pin D-Sub printer port, RGB video out, RF video out, tape/data adaptor port

Power req.                   220-230 volt AC mains

Weight:                        2.4kg

Dimensions:                270 x 55 x 170 (very approx)

Made in:                      UK Tantel Products, Ely)

Rarity:                          9 (1 = common, 10 = Hen's teeth)


 

 

 

 

 

 

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