555 contest winners announcement live on uStream at 9 pm EDT

Should be a fun event. 6PM my time... right after O'Reilly ;-) ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

What's first prize? A Selectric typewriter? A 300 baud acoustic modem?

John

This would fit the contest :-) There are mutliple prizes, at least one for each category:

You can get some modern electronics geek toys:

A genuine Selectric would be so cool. I should have entered. ;-)

It would certainly be a collector's item :-)

My real error in life is not saving a working model of everything I've designed. I have all the paperwork, but that's not the same :-( ...Jim Thompson

Threw one away when we moved house last month. Got it second hand in the UK in 1978 - from one of the other hockey team captains in my field-hockey club - and used it for "important" private correspondence for the next fifteen years (until Epson's ink jet printers started offering the same print quality with much faster printing). It got moved to the Netherlands in 1993 and languished in the attic until we sold the attic, along with the rest of the house.

We bought a couple of extra golf-balls early on for the Greek alphabet, mathematical symbols and some stuff for my wife's work. They all got used, but not that often.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Did you ever interface one? They had bizarre codes, generally somewhat different codes for the keyboard and the ball print mechanism. There was one special set of codes, called "correspondent code" that used the same codes for the keyboard and ball, but that had absolutely nothing in common with ascii, ebcdic, or anything else.

They sure did print nice.

John

The real Selectrics were entirely mechanical. I bought and installed an 'interface' for one, way back when. It was a blue (IIRC) steel box with solenoids that were mounted in improbably spots throughout the mechanisms. It worked okay, if slowly to produce business letters.

They had a much more expensive proportional printing version that was REALLY nice- produced what we called "camera ready" copy. The sort of thing you can do in Indesign (or even MS Word) these days.

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

Only ever interfaced to one manually, from the keyboard. Really don't have a practical use for one, nowadays but

They did indeed.

Thumb tack.

It was called the T/R (Tilt/Rotate) code. IIRC, two bits for the tilt (row) and three for rotate distance plus one for the rotate direction. The bits were ordered such that the furthest distance (slowest operation) was the first bit transmitted so the ball could be slewing while the other bits were in transit ("Correspondence Code" uses the same idea).

Not as nice as the Executives. ;-)

I gave my last selectric away.

After I got the Model 15 TTY running on the TRS-80 I was able to acquire a Selectric I/O Console from an IBM 370 mainframe. It could be controlled with 8 magnets, one for each bit. Unfortunately, the space character had its own magnet so it required a two character sequence. A few of the characters mis-printed unless the print rate was slowed down. It was pretty easy to fix by giving those characters a little extra time!

It was not difficult to port to the IBM PC when I finally got one... John Ferrell W8CCW

Boring! Went and got a burger.

Is there anything creative in that list? ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

Forgot to mention.... nice looking chick! ...Jim Thompson

"Frank Buss" schreef in bericht news:ionesm$rlm$ snipped-for-privacy@newsreader5.netcologne.de...

Did not expect it to be interesting enough to wake up at 4.00 am over here. Now in the afternoon of Thursday 21-4 I walked through the list picking some designs at random to get an impression. So far I found a wealth of interesting impractical and useless applications. Guess you cannot only fill a book but a whole library with them though one or more DVDs might be more practical these days. It would be a real pain (in some place) to select the real usefull applications, if any.

Nevertheless the 555 will still have its use for a lot of people.

petrus bitbyter

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Apparently she's no dummy. Came up with the Atari in a joystick thingy, and the C-one, a reconfigurable computer based on FPGA's

Cheers

sreader5.netcologne.de...

e.

ome

ill

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Who don't have the wit to find something better.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

I'm not surprised. My taste in women requires beauty and brains. As is my wife of 51 years ;-) ...Jim Thompson

I haven't gone thru the list yet. Were there any outstanding entries? ...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, CTO | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona 85048 Skype: Contacts Only | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

Remember: Once you go over the hill, you pick up speed

Congrats on that accomplishment!!!

Tom P. near Albuquerque