[cctalk] Re: Tesla's Forgotten Founder Speaks Out - Exclusive w/ Martin Eberhard

Your quote "to get into the head of those original engineers" is a great sentiment on what the hobby is about. I recall reading about early "steam tractors" - almost trains, before there were any tracks. Monstrous things, I can't recall if they were before steam ship engines - but exploding broilers was a problem (which I view as being akin to "exploding batteries" that we might occasionally deal with today- it happens now and then, as we still haven't perfected the tech {or at least, hadn't 10 years ago}). I'm reading more about those electric powered flying vehicles - with some becoming available around $120K? I think the Joby eVTOL recently did a first public flight between two airports. I've been flying one in MS simulator, neat to see that they might become a reality. The main naysayers of electric-anything vehicles tend to point to cold weather (northern winter) environments. Anyhow, those "personal minicomputers" from 1968-1969 are neat. It's a whole generation of computing that (IMO) is kind of forgotten about - but then again, they cost as much as a house then, so generally only business owners (like supermarket owners) could afford them. I suspect Gomez Addams had a few in their basement :) I've seen some Data General's of that era restored. I'm still trying to see if there are any functional DDP-116 or SEL810B around - but you're right, flip-switch programming is kind of a drag and working teletypes are hard to find these days. You mentioned having your own RAM card, like custom built? Someone recently made an SRAM based replacement RWS for the IBM 5110. Neat stuff, I never yet had the patience (or equipment) for that kind of detailed signal analysis to reverse engineer something like that. -Steve (voidstar / Domesticating the Computer) On Tue, Aug 26, 2025 at 11:26 AM Paul Koning via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: