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Memorabilia: Power, Amplified

2025-02-21T00:07:34Z

Although it didn’t start out that way, I guess this qualifies as a “memorabilia” post, given that it deals with stuff I’ve kept for the past 33 years…

Everyone has their own way of relating to significant purchases like a car, computer, television, camera, or stereo. Some people love buying new stuff when it’s on sale. Others pride themselves on getting a bargain by buying used. My M.O. has always been to buy the absolute best I can find, mostly irrespective of cost, then making it last as long as humanly possible… often long after newer, better things have made it obsolete. I take pride in having top-quality stuff and keeping it forever, and because of that I often form an emotional attachment to the objects I’ve acquired.

I can’t say that my first stereo was one of those things. It wasn’t very noteworthy, but it provided a lot of pleasure during my high school and college days.

But as I graduated college, got married, and moved into the workforce, digital audio arrived in the form of compact discs, and in 1992 my cheap high-school era stereo was decidedly worn out and in need of replacement. And my first job after college provided the necessary cash to splurge on something nice.

As fortune would have it, my then-spouse was working at a local electronics specialty store called Leiser and could get top-quality stereo components at cost. We wound up buying a hand-picked ensemble, spending around $1,500 on equipment that would have retailed for around $3,200 (which translates to about $7,000 in 2024 dollars).

I really loved that system, and was always proud to show it off. I’ll say more about that in a bit, but first let’s follow its history.

The majority of that system stayed with me following our divorce and my half-dozen subsequent moves, although I used it less and less over time, and the remaining components spent the last decade-plus stored away in their boxes…

Until recently. While noodling around YouTube I stumbled onto a tiny product that is essentially nothing more than a Bluetooth audio receiver with stereo outputs that could be hooked up directly to the auxiliary input of a traditional preamp. Such a device would allow Inna & I to stream any audio from our computers or smartphones directly through my audiophile rig. That was enough to spur me to finally dig up my beloved 33 year-old components and set them up for our enjoyment in 2025.

Of course, a couple of the old pieces are gone. The CD player that we received as a group wedding present from several university friends eventually self-destructed, and there wasn’t any point in keeping the old cassette tape player from my high school stereo. And I’d tossed my huge trunk-sized Infinity 7 Kappa speakers when the cones had dry rotted. I’d also discarded my old speaker cable and patch cords, but those were easy to replace.

But the most important three core pieces of my system were still there – my preamp, equalizer, and power amp – which needed little more than a thorough dusting. Lemme do a little show-and-tell about those, because I still hold a lot of affection for these three components.

Let’s start with my graphic equalizer. An EQ is useful to boost or cut specific frequency ranges in an audio signal. Got speakers that sound tinny? Use the sliders to boost bass and midtones. Don’t want to wake the baby on the other side of the house? You might quiet the bass a little while leaving everything else normal. Got a room where one speaker has to be placed in a back corner? Boost the left channel or reduce the right.

My 12-channel Denon DE70 graphic equalizer is a quality and useful piece of equipment. It’s always provided great service, and I find its lit bank of 24 faders visually appealing. It’s a bit unique in that the faders for the left and right channels are interleaved as paired green and yellow LEDS, rather than the more common setup that uses two physically separate banks of sliders. And there’s my little Bluetooth receiver perched at top left:

Next, the crown jewel: my power amplifier. A power amp has just one job: take a microwatt “line level” audio signal and boost it to the tens or hundreds of Watts necessary to drive one’s chosen loudspeakers. It’s the final device in the audio processing sequence, connecting to and controlling the output from your speakers.

My power amp was manufactured by Carver, which comes with a bit of backstory.

Bob Carver was a legendary audiophile engineer, especially known for his innovative and impressively powerful amplifiers. I was first introduced to his work in high school, when my friend Paul showed me his brother’s stereo, which included Carver’s M400 old-school vacuum tube power amp, a radical-looking 7-inch square black cube that could pump out 200 Watts per channel: a ridiculous amount of power for a home system at that time. It made quite an impression on me!

The Carver TFM-4.0 power amp that I bought in 1992 is one of Carver’s followup models, offering a ludicrous 375 Watts per channel. It’s a great amp by a great engineer, but because Carver only produced this model for one year, it’s a rare and collectable component even within Carver’s exclusive lineup. Like the M400 that Paul showed me back in 1981, its only display is six sets of LEDs to show the power level of the signal it’s sending to the speakers; and in all the years I’ve owned it, no matter how high I pumped up the volume, I’ve never been able to light any but the first, lowest power level LEDs. The thing is a 23-pound workhorse!

That just leaves my preamplifier, which is like the central conductor of a stereo system, orchestrating inputs from various sources (e.g. CD player, radio tuner, turntable, tape deck, microphone, and now even Bluetooth devices), sending a normalized signal out to the EQ and back, and then downstream to the power amp and speakers.

Like my EQ, my preamp is a decent piece of equipment. Being a CT-17 preamp/tuner made by Carver, it matches my power amp, but doesn’t have anywhere near the same cachet as his power amps. But the built-in radio receiver is a convenient combination.

Which brings me to the final, missing piece of the puzzle, the thing that kept me from setting up my stereo over the past decade-plus: the lack of speakers.

A good stereo is worthless without good speakers, and for a long time I wasn’t able to justify spending a lot of money on a set that would do justice to my other components. But I finally found a set of bookshelf speakers with positive reviews, that wasn’t too exorbitant, and which – if I bought them refurbished – would fit neatly within the credit card rewards bucks I was about to liquidate.

So let me introduce you to my one brand-new component: a set of Polk Audio R200 bookshelf loudspeakers. While I haven’t had them long enough to form a strong opinion of them (or bond with them), they seem to be doing a good job so far. They’re noteworthy in having a very flat response, which means considerably less tweaking of the frequency curve on the equalizer than I’m used to. I only wish I could move them a little farther from the wall, to better distribute the bass.

Although this didn’t start out as one of my official “memorabilia” posts, overall I’m delighted to have my old components back in service again. Despite being 33 years old, they still deliver great sound quality, and it’s really nice having a Bluetooth connection to stream music at will from any of Inna’s and my laptops and phones. I’m really glad I lugged this equipment around with me for all these years!

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Retrogression Analysis

2024-11-15T14:41:22Z

I was probably 15 or 16 years old when computers first started appearing at the consumer level.

In the late 1970s, these were mostly for playing games. I played Pong (1972) and Asteroids (1979) on the first arcade consoles; Air-Sea Battle (1977) at Sears on the Atari VCS; Carriers at War (1984) on the Apple ][, and Crush, Crumble and Chomp! (1981) on the TRS-80.

My first experience using a computer for anything other than games was the University of Maine mainframe in 1982, long before the invention of the Web (1989) or even the TCP/IP protocol (1983) that heralded the creation of the Internet.

This was a time when card punches and readers were still being actively used. Students preferred to do homework on paper-fed teletype terminals like the DECwriter II rather than video display monitors, because they would still have a printed record of their assignment if the mainframe crashed and lost their work. It would be years before the first IBM PC model would appear on campus.

It’s a fair question to ask: with no games and no Internet, what did we actually do on the university computer?

Herein lies an interesting tale. You see, before TCP/IP, IBM had created its own networking protocol called RSCS, and in 1981 – a year before I arrived at UMaine – RSCS was used to connect computers at UMaine, Yale, CUNY, and a handful of other colleges in an academic network known as BITNET. BITNET allowed users at different sites to send programs and data files to one another, exchange email, and send interactive messages, and it would eventually grow to over 3,000 universities across much of the developed world.

In 1982, the idea of being able to send an instant message to someone across campus – or even across the country! – was incredibly compelling.

But RSCS messages weren’t all that. An incoming message would interrupt whatever you were doing, whether that was running a program, archiving files to magnetic tape, or composing a term paper. Each message was separate; there was no concept of an ongoing conversation, and there was no way to include anyone other than the sender and one recipient.

TeleVideo 925 terminal

That all changed in 1983, when one of our university’s computer center staffmembers took an example program from a magazine and ran it on his mainframe account: WGH@MAINE. The program was what we called “a chat machine”; users across BITNET could sign in and send messages to it, and the program would echo those messages to all the other signed-in users. It was the ultimate ancestor of later services like Chat@PSUVM1, Relay@Bitnic, IRC, and Discord.

And its use spread like wildfire among the undergrads. If you were a smart kid who wasn’t into partying, then hanging out on a chat machine was how you spent your time. I devoted endless hours with a cadre of other geeks in the mainframe’s “user area”, idly hanging out on these early chat machines, conversing by text message with an increasingly familiar set of students from random sites across the world. I joined several other Mainers in making the trip down to New York City to attend the world’s first ChatCon meetup in 1984.

These days, I still retain a deep sense of nostalgia for those early days, and keep a few of the memories alive in odd, eccentric ways. Not only does my laptop’s “Terminal” window open in the classic green-on-black of a monochrome mainframe terminal, with the standard CMS “Ready;” prompt, but it also paints the default character-graphic VM/370 login panel. I wish one of my friends still had a copy of the old CAPS/UMaine login panel: an outline of the state of Maine, done in asterisk characters!

My Terminal window also uses the same idiosyncratic font-face as the huge old IBM 3278 terminals of the day. That’s kind of an indulgence, because I never used one… The only 3278s were kept inside the mainframe machine room; lowly student users like me only had access to TeleVideo 925 or 955 terminals… And no one has bothered to port those terminals’ fonts to modern Truetype or Postscript files!

One of the attributes of those mainframe terminals that I recall most fondly were their industrial-strength keyboards. They were of the same vintage as IBM’s “Big Iron” mainframes, long before “planned obsolescence” was a thing. Those keyboards were built to easily withstand a decade of student use, or a direct thermonuclear explosion, whichever came first.

Those old 4½ pound mainframe keyboards were so different from the flimsy, commodity rubber membrane actuated keyboards you get today, or the 1.4 pound Apple Magic Keyboard with its little scissor switches and a mere 1.15mm of key travel. And frankly I really missed the typing experience of a solid, durable keyboard with mechanical switches.

So now I have to admit… This whole nostalgia dump was really just a lead-up to this: I recently bought my first mechanical keyboard.

Now the first thing I’m gonna do is warn you: if you get intimidated by too many choices, selecting a mechanical keyboard is a complete morass! You’re absolutely inundated with choice, beginning with what size keyboard you want, and what keyboard layout. Then there’s tons of different keycaps to choose from, coming not just in different colors, but with different heights and profiles. Next there’s hundreds of different types of switches, with different travel, activation, and sound profiles. Mechanical keyboards are – unexpectedly – one of those incredibly detailed, technical areas that enthusiasts love to submerse themselves into, for reasons known only to the cognoscenti.

Saving you all the drama, I chose a Keychron V6 Max. I wanted something really traditional: a full-sized keyboard with dedicated function keys, arrow keys, and a number keypad, similar to the original IBM Enhanced PC keyboard, which is probably the most famous keyboard in history. The V6 Max is also wireless, which I prefer, given that I often type with the keyboard on my lap. And it’s sturdy, weighing in at 4.47 pounds, only half an ounce lighter than my beloved TeleVideo 925!

I kept the stock keycaps, which are a nice two-toned blue, with reddish ESC and ENTER keys. The keyboard has modes for both Mac and Windows, as well as dedicated keycaps for both OS’ idiosyncratic command keys.

Not knowing much about switches, I ordered two sets: the Gateron Jupiter Brown and Gateron Jupiter Banana, but I quickly opted to run the latter, which have a more satisfying sound, which will hopefully not perturb my housemate.

Other features… The keyboard is customizable with industry-standard QMK or VIA software. It also has a handy dedicated volume/mute knob on the top row just to the right of the F12 key. Like many modern keyboards, it comes with (often maligned) programmable LED backlighting, which I’ve set to simply flash blue underneath each key as it is activated. I also bought a nice clear plastic keyboard cover to put over it when not in use.

Having had it for six weeks, I have to say that it’s been a pure delight, and I find myself looking for reasons to sit down at the keyboard and bang away on it. In fact, I enjoy typing on it so much that I’ve been thinking about setting up a Discord text chat for a gathering of BITNET friends to revisit those old days when we used to spend hours upon hours typing to one another across the ether (hence the reminiscing about chat machines, above). And fair warning: another way I’ll satisfy my rejuvenated enthusiasm for typing is to produce more longwinded blogposts like this one!

I’ve only had two minor niggles. I had one bad switch – which happened to be on my ‘s’ key – that would register a double-strike about half the time. However, that was easily remedied by swapping the switch out. The other niggle is one I’ve had in the past with several other keyboards: the little rubber feet on the ends of the keyboard’s prop-up legs always seem to come loose for me, requiring an end-user application of superglue to stay put.

So after all that, the bottom line of this post was just to spend time gushing about having finally bought myself a quality keyboard. I’ve been dealing with garbage chiclet keyboards ever since I left college back in the late 1980s, and – given the amount of time I still spend sitting at the computer! – I was way overdue in treating myself to a higher quality input device.

And I’ll type, type, type till my baby takes my key-board away…
(no apologies to Brian Wilson)

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Binary Digits

2024-09-02T01:46:04Z

Say you were a young college student taking a programming class, and your aging computer science professor’s first assignment was for each student to write a program to print out their name and telephone number.

That wouldn’t be the least bit sus, now would it?

Apparently, back in 1984 it wasn’t! Lemme tell you a story…

I was recently bedridden with both a back injury and my first case of Covid. And having already purged many of my old books, I really had to stretch (metaphorically, of course) to find something to entertain myself with.

One book that followed me through my migrations – from Maine to (five different locations in) Massachusetts, then Pittsburgh, and finally Texas – was a college textbook that was highly cherished by most of the CS majors I knew back then: George Struble’s “Assembler Language Programming for the IBM System/370 Family”.

Yes, I was so bored that I started re-reading a 40 year old textbook on one of the driest topics in all of computer science, for a computer that no longer exists!

Chapter 1 is a snoozer (not unlike the rest of the book). It’s all about how mainframe computers used combinations of ones and zeroes to encode numbers and characters. Like any textbook, the end of Chapter 1 had a dozen exercises for the student to solve, to promote active learning and demonstrate a practical understanding of what’s been taught.

Here’s the text of Problem 1.3: (emphasis mine)

Each byte of storage in the IBM System/370 contains eight bits of information and one parity bit. The parity bit is redundant; it is used only to guarantee that information bits are not lost. The parity bit is set to 1 or 0 so as to make the sum of 1’s represented in the nine bits an odd number. For example, the character / is represented in eight bits (in EBCDIC) by 01100001. The parity bit to go with this character will be 0, because there are three 1’s among the information-carrying bits. The character Q is represented by 11011000, and the parity bit is set to 1, so there will be five 1-bits among the nine. These representations with parity bit (we call this “odd parity”) are also used in magnetic tape and disk storage associated with the IBM System/370. Using the character representation table of Appendix A, code your name and telephone number in eight-bit EBCDIC representations, and add the correct parity bit to each character.

That’s right: on just the third exercise in the entire book, Struble is asking the student to provide their personal contact info, presumably to their instructor. I can only imagine the repercussions if a professor presented this exercise to his or her class today.

To be fair, when Struble’s book came out (in 1969, then revised in 1974 and again in 1984) such an assignment simply wouldn’t have set off the red flags it does today. The author and his editors probably felt safe in the assumption that women wouldn’t be taking hard-core mainframe assembler classes. And for the odd exception, what harm could possibly come from a young coed revealing her phone number to an upstanding member of the academic community?

What harm, indeed.

I’m not one to condemn past generations for not living up to more modern social norms, but still… Today that exercise just screams of inappropriateness and invasion of privacy. For me, reading that was a head-scratching moment of astonishment from an unexpected source, a true blast from my past.

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