Once a staple of State Fairs, with its handwriting analysis and personality profiles. Maybe there was only one ever made (at home, possibly), and it has always remained in the same hands. Anyway, this year it was noticeably absent, and I suspect that gone are all the days of this relice from our childhood. Pretty thin info on it.
I remember those. It analyzed my name and birthday, and told me I would retire in 2021. This was in 1968, and I was totally amazed the computer could figure that out for me.
How did you remember the name of the thing?
I very vaguely remember seeing one over here in Oz when I was younger. A bit of Googling throws up a few pics and videos. The simple question is really, what is it? I deeply suspect that there is no computer anywhere near the system. The setup is nothing more than a board with some flashing lights in it, and a system that dishes out preprinted Barnum statement “analysies” probably involving a human sitting behind the panel.
This may be of interest:
http://cjcamp.com/post/181637088/televac-86000
Yup, pure Barnum. I had forgotten that a very simple personal computer would have been available by about the time these came out, so one of those and a dot matrix printer is about all you need. Maintenance might be an issue unless some has ported the code.
I was 12 when I encountered a similar system at a small county fair in Minnesota in 1970. Instead of a paper printout, it plopped a bunch of IBM-style punch cards (with circular holes at random) with preprinted fortunes. I kept those cards for years, now where are they? They’re probably worth at least $5 on eBay!
It looks as thought it might be the Televac Computer Company of Versailles, Missouri. Anyone wanna go check 'em out? (I have a feeling it’s somebody’s garage.)
Maybe not as “gone” as you might suspect. I see one (or something very similar) at our county fair every year. It’s actually kind of reassuring to know that those old 8-bit processors (I’m thinking Z80) last that long…
It was at the Texas State Fair once again this year, its been there every year for as long as I can remember.
There were a couple of people reading their results when I passed by, printouts on dot-matrix sheets with the sprocket hole sections still attached.
Amazing isn’t it - they were futuristic when they first appeared, now they are amusingly retro.
This says they date back to 1974.
I’m pretty sure it’s not a “computer” doing any “analyzing” although it may have a computer running the lights and feed mechanism. It’s just a carnival contraption with blinking lights and randomly assorted generic responses it spits out.
I learned programming, circa 1969, on an old IBM 1620 at a local community college.
With some experience, you could actually get some kind of idea what your program was doing by watching the patterns of the blinking lights. More seriously, whenever the machine came to a screeching halt, you might be able to get a clue about what happened by looking at various registers via the (no-longer-blinking) lights.
I miss the days of computers with consoles full of blinkenlights.
Wow these people are making a business of it.
I wish I could find a blinkenlights screensaver.
Heck, until maybe 4 years ago the Navy was still using a blinky-lights computer, the AN/UYQ-20. This is the latest version but the one that I was working on before it was finally decommissioned for these latest versions ran on a 7-bit OS. You opened it up and had access to the lights and push switches for loading. In theory, if you were really determined, you could program the entire machine via those switches. But, it usually used a type of magnetic tape where the holes were punched out.
Those lights were helpful when it came to determining a fault and by loading certain sequences to perform certain tasks you could narrow it down to the broken IC chip.
There’s now web sites that produce similar nonsense.
For example Omgili.
It pretends that a computer can understand the english language. Its just a stupid computer, no better than a spammer. Someone should blow Omgili up.
Here’s what it says about this thread at the moment, (this might change someone does actually blow them up. )
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Oh sure, the processor will last; but what happens when they run out of paper for their dot-matrix printers? Does anybody still make that stuff?
Heck, you can still buy a dot-matrix printer, new, for a couple hundred dollars.
I forgot to post this two weeks ago - there was one at the Arizona state fair this year, just like always…
And, some more info came to light on why it probably wasn’t at our own State Fair: Money. A consultant told our state fair management that he could raise revenue by tripling the booth rentals. A number of vendors, probably this one included, told him “No thanks.”