First, wear your dust mask. Who knows where these machines have been?
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This guy’s channel is great!
Glad to hear that! Yep he’s got a sense of humor -and- knows his stuff.
Pretty sure he’s a Mastodon user, too.
He’s got a bit of an obsession with light bulbs. I love it.
Analog computers are pretty cool, yet underrated tech. Although they aren’t very flexible compared to digital computers in the range of what they can do, they do their specific use case very well.
Need to solve a partial differential equation in real time? Don’t bother with iterative algorithms, that’s fool’s math, playa. Just hook it up to an analog computer specifically designed to solve that PDE type, rig up some wires for the input and output to your oscilloscope for real time mathz.
Ur so right! Diffy-Q has its uses, but analog was too advanced for us to grok so we had to settle for it. Newton ‘discovered’ gravity, and calculus, then found out how useful calc was!
Non-linear? Hella faster! Nature went with analog long ago. No analog, no music!
Tbf, the pinball machine is not really the same as an analog computer, it uses relays in the same way that a modern computer uses a transistor. There is no continuously variable part, just lots of on/offs.
He’s even serious when he makes a blooper. Brilliant.
That guy is younger than he looks. He’s only 30. Quite the “old soul”.
For those with an interest in pinball, I strongly recommend looking up Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game. It may be a bit of a predictable, B-rated movie, but it’s a lot of fun to watch and has some good lines. Hulu has it!
I can’t wait to watch this having restored an early 90s Williams machine years back. Doubly so with it being a TC vid, his channel is excellent.
I wanted a machine in college but knew I’d have to understand and maintain it with so many moving parts, thus shelving the idea pretty quickly. Years later, I stumbled into an arcade abused cabinet with a decent playfield and had to have it. It was a challenging few months but a decade later it still works great and I’ve grown comfortable with crawling in there. Great forums like Pinside were also a tremendous help, I wouldn’t have taken the gamble without the Internet.
My god, if you understand how these systems work, I’m impressed.
I’m good with DC stuff of this era (switches, relays, etc) and man I have to work hard to visualize these things.
I’m seriously impressed with the engineers who designed these crazy complex electro-mechanical systems.
I have some older relatives who were aircraft engineers back when these types of systems were used… Aircraft up through the 70’s. I’ve read some of their manuals… Staggering complexity.
Well, I’d say I understand enough to get by but I did also grow up building RC cars and later working on electronics/computers, so that definitely helped. That said, there’s been more than a few times I had to break out a wiring diagram and consult with folks online because I was too scared to break something.
With all those noises moving parts inside, playing an OLD machine felt like tickling a hippo.
I know a guy who works on Pinball machines as his profession. He sells em too.
Really enjoyed Skylab that he repaired. Seeing the way Electromechanicals run everything so…binary…is fascinating
Apologies for hijacking the thread, as I understand my comment is only tangential towards what is being discussed, but if you love pinball machines it’s such a great link to take a look at, so I thought I would still share it with you all.
I’ve been there!! Amazing spot to play pinball, just wish they served beer… I’m pretty sure they have over 200 tables and some fairly rare ones. Bonzai Run, and Water world are 2 that had fairly limited runs but can be played there.
