Oh, hey

[trevorflowers]

Hey, y'all. I'm Trevor Flowers.

I'm a precision machinist in Seattle though I work on a variety of oddball projects. In 2014 I made a full sized Memex from an alternate timeline where Vannevar Bush was inspired by the Time illustrations to commission a prototype. The camera, lever, and button inputs are fed to a simluator that drives the displays and speakers to make it feel like you're really making trails as described in "As We May Think".

Then I started making a limited series of 1:6 scale Memex. Last week I shipped No.6 to its new owner in Atlanta.



A couple of months ago I worked with Alan Kay to create six reproductions of the Xerox Alto display for use in museums. They were shown at the Computer History Museum in California in April and a couple stayed there, I think mostly so that the museum staff can play networked Maze War.



I'm currently working on a device from an alternate timeline where instead of working on the Alto the PARCies focused on making the Dynabook concept a reality.

Let's see. What else. The first computer that was mine all mine was a TRS Model 100 but I also played a lot of hunt the wumpus on an Osborne luggable around the same time.

I know that as an alternate timeline device maker I'm not the usual type of collector or enthusiast but I'm glad to be here so I hope that's OK.

 

[VERAULT]

Welcome Trevor. Very interesting "what ifs"

 

[Getafix]

I made mostly software but I found now that I am older I like physical makes quite a lot. I hope to get better at that. You make beautiful things! Well done.

 

[Caluser2000]

Welcome.

 

[1944GPW]

G'day, and welcome to another scale modeller! You've done fabulous work on that 1:1 Memex and smaller models as an unusual and fantastic subject described in Bush's article that is still fascinating today.
I wonder if Douglas Engelbart had not read it whilst stationed in the Pacific during WWII would he have gone on to develop the NLS with mouse and keyset.

Your replica Altos look pretty neat. What did you make the monitor bases from, I'm guessing MDF or plywood? I made myself a 3D printed scale replica of the Alto keyset to use with ContrAlto but I still haven't finished the hookup to the ATtiny85 I got for it. I bought enough switches, rods, screws etc. to make a number of kits sometime.

 

[trevorflowers]

G'day, and welcome to another scale modeller!

Thank you for the welcome and hello, fellow modeller. It's a funny old kind of work but I love it.

I wonder if Douglas Engelbart had not read it whilst stationed in the Pacific during WWII would he have gone on to develop the NLS with mouse and keyset.

I daydream about this, too. For example, what if Engelbart and the rest of his SRI team had focused on tracking gestural input (perhaps using radar like Google did with their Soli chip) instead of keys and the mouse? Or some sort of pre-digital sound command recognition, like a type of spoken language of tones and pauses that could be picked up by signal processing tech of the day. Interesting stuff.

Your replica Altos look pretty neat. What did you make the monitor bases from, I'm guessing MDF or plywood?

Inside both the display and the base are laser cut and then bent steel parts for strength and then the outer parts are 3D printed, sanded, filled, sanded, painted, and then sealed. If I had more budget and time I'd loved to have cast aluminum for the bases and formed fiberglass for the display case parts.

Here is the metal frame by itself (loosely assembled):



And here's the rear display case with the metal part installed:

I made myself a 3D printed scale replica of the Alto keyset to use with ContrAlto but I still haven't finished the hookup to the ATtiny85 I got for it. I bought enough switches, rods, screws etc. to make a number of kits sometime.

Very cool! It looks great. Yeah, the keyset is such an interesting piece of kit. At the CHM event Dan Ingalls (one of the creators of Smalltalk) mentioned that most people at PARC didn't take to it but when someone did it was a sight to see, with one hand on the mouse and one hand on the keyset they could really fly. Please put me on a list of people who would be interested in a kit if you do end up releasing one.

 

[trevorflowers]

I made mostly software but I found now that I am older I like physical makes quite a lot. I hope to get better at that. You make beautiful things! Well done.

Same! I wrote code for 25 years and worked in the metal shop on the side. in 2020 I just couldn't spend all day typing any longer so I went back to school to get properly trained as a machinist. I joke that I moved away from using only electrons and toward using more protons and neutrons.

 

[seaken]

Welcome Trevor. Seattle was my home town and birth place. I had a friend in West Seattle High School who used to bring his Tandy 100 portable to our physics class. I was intrigued. But I never got my own computer until years later, in about 1989. It was a Tandy 1400FD portable - PC Compatible.

Seaken

 

[trevorflowers]

Welcome Trevor. Seattle was my home town and birth place. I had a friend in West Seattle High School who used to bring his Tandy 100 portable to our physics class. I was intrigued. But I never got my own computer until years later, in about 1989. It was a Tandy 1400FD portable - PC Compatible.

Seaken

The 1400 line was more capable than the 100 if for no other reason than the internal floppy drives. West Seattle High is a stone's throw from my place.

 

[seaken]

I was browsing around today and I have to correct my comment above. It was not a model 100 I saw from my buddy in high school but it was instead a model PC-2, a TRS-80 branded portable that was made by Sharp and ran Basic. That was in 1982. The Model 100 was not until 1983. My memory was playing tricks on me.

And yes, the 1440FD was a fully IBM PC compatible with two floppy drives and came with Tandy MS-DOS 3.3. I also attached a parallel port portable Hard Drive and a modem on the serial port.

Seaken