Retronauts - 782: RCA Home Computing

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

Watch out for VIPers! Kevin Bunch interviews gaming pioneer Joyce Weisbecker about her father Joe’s work on the 1802 microprocessor and its role in video gaming.Retronauts is made possible by listener support through Patreon! Support the show to enjoy ad-free early access, better audio quality, and great exclusive content. Learn more at http://www.patreon.com/retronauts

An inspirational portrait of a farmer's son who rises from humble beginnings to build a luxury fashion empire. Brunello, the gracious visionary, traces Brunello Cucinelli's life journey, his commitment to craftsmanship, ethical values, and humanistic philosophy. Directed by Academy Award winner Giuseppe Tonatore, the film blends documentary and fiction, an intimate look at the Italian entrepreneur known as the King of Kashmir. See Brunello, the gracious visionary, in select theaters July 24th. This week on Retronauts, we're moving beyond the studio system. The best I could come up with.

Sorry. Hello and welcome to a special Retronauts. I'm your host, Kevin Bunch. I'm reporting in from the Vintage Computer Festival East in Wall, New Jersey. I'm sitting down with a real Cosmec, VIP, pioneer of video game and indeed indie game development, Joyce Weisbecker. You can introduce yourself. Hi, I can now jump in, and yes, I'm Joyce Weisbeger. I'm the first independent video game developer

because I did the Speedway tag game for the RCA Studio 2 TV console, which my father designed and developed and designed the microprocessor and went in it and wrote the ship-eight language that was used with it and did many other things. Yeah, I've been acquainted with Joyce for some years now. I'm really excited to have you on. I've been kind of interested in having you come in

and talk about some of your experiences. but I'm like, well, I don't know how easy it is to, like, set up a recording, but the fact that we happened to both be here made it perfect. So I'm really excited to talk about that. And, you know, you mentioned your father, Joe Weisbecker. He was really a computer and gaming pioneer in his own right during his tenure with the American Consumer Electronics Giant RCA. He did a lot of other stuff outside of RCA, which we'll talk about as well.

But, you know, platforms powered by the... 1801 and 1802 micro processors. Those were kind of as babies, like the Studio 2, Cosmack Elf and VIP, all those sorts of machines. And yeah, like you said, you wrote some works for those. And I'm excited to talk about those as well. Longtime listeners may remember way back in 2020,

the podcast had an episode talked about the Studio 2 and the Fairchild Channel F. But, you know, since RCA's histories of specific, like, fascination to me, I'm really happy to give it its due in a whole episode. And I'm really excited to do it with someone who had kind of a front row seat for a lot of those activities. So, let's jump in a little bit. Like, what were your first experiences with computers?

Well, let me address what you just said about, had a front row seat. Actually, I was sitting backstage as my father. was doing all this. Oh, that's a good matter. More like that, because I'm family. And he was always talking at the dinner, dining room table, about what was going on at work that was, the part that was not so upsetting that you went off to set my mother.

Like, you know, I hear rumors of layoffs. We didn't talk about that at dinner. Right. But things that were going well and interesting things that other people were working on at work. And then, of course, if my sister I showed any interest in what he was doing, he was like, go on and it's actually, explain what he was doing. And I was the one who was more interested in it. My mother was an

elementary school teacher. She was listening in behavior and people and education. And my sister took more after her. I mean, she wanted to work with animals and work with children. She wasn't really interested in working alone, isolated in an office somewhere. And I was more like my father and said, we don't really need social contact. You know, if we have to work three days in a row and never see another person to get a project done, that's fine. We're not missing anything. just different personality. So different interests. And I was really interested in the things my dad was showing me.

I wasn't interested in building hardware. And my father was always interested in building the things that he did. And I was only interested in the theory behind it. He was into the theory, and then he wanted to design something that pushed beyond the known theory to see if it would work. And I wasn't too enthusiastic about spending the time learning the skills, to actually build something just to see if it worked. So when I discovered you can mathematically describe the behavior of something

and prove that it was going to work right, just doing math, I said, I'm learning math. And then my father pointed out that, you know, computers do math really easily. I said, whoa, that's it, computer programming, because computer modeling a simulation of devices sounds like a faster way to get through a lot of projects than actually building things mechanically or electrical circuits just to see if they work.

Yeah. So I wasn't really introduced to programming. I was introduced to the idea of designing things and testing to see if your ideas worked. And then it was sort of like, yeah, but if you can describe the behavior mathematically, computers can do the math for you. Much faster. That's a say. It's much faster. And then when you want to show it to someone else, you can just turn the computer on and you don't have to remember exactly what you did to make sure you do the equations right and solve them right in front of someone. Yeah.

I was very appealing. I can see that, yeah. So that is the, I sort of came in the back door to programming. It's like, do you want to learn how to do carpentry? Do you want to learn how to do hydraulics? Do you want to learn how to do electrical circuits? And it was like, I want to just design things and test to see if they work. Ooh, maybe you just want to describe your project mathematically and then write a program that simulates it.

Oh, yeah. Perfect. Yeah, I get it. And again, that's video games too. Yeah. Because they're simulating something you do with the real world. They're just, you know, there's not devices. They're sets of rules, you know, or the graphics.

The same kind of thing. So it was like, oh, yeah, and I can do computer games. Yeah, I mean, it's all math for computers. They're not worried about the specifics of what you're trying to do. Right. Now, unfortunately, it was hard for me to admit that to my father, and it was very nice and tolerant of me. Okay.

We were watching a sitcom once. My sister and I were young, and it was all about the pressure from your parents to do what they want you to do and not in the country. And at a commercial break, my father turned to me and my sister and said, you know, your mother and I are successful people in our own right. We don't need to live vitariously through you two girls.

So don't worry about whether we expect your discipline, us, or anything. If you don't pick up on the hobbies we suggest you, we only suggest them because we were interested in it. And there's probably something that's an inheritance thing. So if it's something we like, maybe it's something you don't like. But if it's not, it's okay. We're not doing it because we want you to do something for a career.

We're just like, oh, I find this interesting. Maybe you will too. Yeah, I get it. No pressure. I have a small child at home, and you have to introduce your hobbies and see if he likes them. Some of them he's really into. He really followed my wife on enjoying artistic measures,

but also he likes to mess around with computers and animation and whatnot. My sister had more of my hobbies than my mother had. I had more issues than the hobbies of my father had. But in both cases, they were a little different. My sister wanted to be a veterinarian instead of working with children. But it's still interacting with things that interact with you and relationships. and I wanted to do the different kind of programming. I wanted to use the computer as a tool for programming,

but my father was more interested in the hardware, so he taught me a lot about the hardware, but it was sort of, it wasn't a disappointment that I wasn't going to hardware. It was more like, darn, I thought it had someone to hang out with and pursue the same hobby with, and no, okay. It was just sort of an incidental interest to you. Right, you're hoping for someone has exactly the same thing you'd have another hobbyist, enthusiasts with you.

Yeah. And it's just similar. That's okay. Yeah, that's fine. And, you know, your father, he liked to tinker. And he worked in RCA on computer technology. That was sort of his big thing. I remember digging through some of his papers

and seeing, like, materials he had, like, proposals for, like, a mini-computer, work on the Spectra-70 line. And I think, what was it, memory, I think, One of his... One of his assignments at RCA was not only control logic units for the mainframes, but researching memories. And you think, well, how much research are you going to memories? But it wasn't modern memories.

It was magnetic core memories. And it was before magnetic core memories, different approaches to building memories that he was researching. And even when it was memory systems that they were already used in IBM computers, part of the research was, okay, the yields are horrible. So how do you have circuitry around it that during a test procedure

identifies bad bits and programs around it so that the programmer never knows which are the missing addresses? So that's the kind of research he did. And again, control logic. A little test and circumvent

the bad memory locations with making it transparent to the end user. Yeah. So it's a little more than just like, you know, memory physics kind of thing, memory architecture. You know, you've mentioned, like, in our previous conversations when we, like, recorded an oral history for the Hagley Museum, but your father was very interested in, like, magic.

And that seems like in that line to me, just like you don't have to know what's going on behind the curtain as long as it seems like it's working just fine on your end. Which was why my approach to, hey, if you know the math, you don't have to build the scene natural to me because, I mean, I guess if you actually like carpentry or engineering, you miss the not building it part. But if the goal is to prove to someone it will behave in a certain way and you could do it math and convince them of it, then you could build it when they wanted one. It seemed natural to me because I was raised by a magician. And he said, you know, I don't want to give any spoilers. So is it okay in the podcast?

If I give away a couple of secrets and magicians? Go for it. Okay. They don't actually make things appear and disappear. I am shocked. I know, and I hate to lead that out in the public, but, you know, it's a small group of insiders for the podcast, so I think I'll say, and the word won't get back to the magic community

who left the cat out of the bag. But it's all creating the illusion that things are disappearing and reappearing when you inflate coins. and cards. And, you know, so when you're raised with someone who's showing you that and trying to get you interested in that, from a person who is not interested in the performing,

he's more of a student. He says, I found out through performing, giving magic shows, things. I'm too nervous to be a professional performer. So I found out what I liked about magic. I'm a student of magic. I like studying how the tricks are done. I like thinking of new tricks. but I don't want to be a performer.

So I'm a student of magic. And so I know it was okay to be a student of some subject and actually do final products and something else. But if you use the same techniques that he used to say, designing the control logic unit of a computer feels like inventing a magic trick. Because you go through the same process, you picture the audience reaction,

the effect you want to create in the illusion, And then you figure out how to create that illusion in their mind. And the computer is the greatest thing when you read about them. He knew that's what he wanted to do for the day job. He goes, it's just on-off switches that turn on-and-off other-on-switches in a clever arrangement, a lot of them. And it creates the illusion that is doing something else. No one looks at the computer and says, oh, man, that's a lot of on-off switches going on and off into intricate patterns. They look at it and say, it's doing this.

I can play pool on this thing. Right, it's playing this game against me. Okay? It's formatting a document. It's sending something to the printer. No, it's not. It's turned on off switches in patterns based on patterns of other on off switches. It's just whoever designed that circuit,

it looks like that's what they're doing, because if I type two numbers on the keyboard and I get out the addition of those two numbers, there's no adding circuit. There's a circuit that switches things. And it happens to be certain bit patterns create another bit pattern out. And then someone has cleverly arranged it.

So the bit, two separate bit patterns that represent numbers, the output is always the addition of them, or if you hit another signal, another mode, another circuit is the subtraction of them. It's just really cleverly solving the problem of if you get this pattern as input, what pattern you want is output, and that behavior, people interpret as,

oh, that's what happens when you add two numbers. So it must be adding. Yeah. I mean, and that's everything. And my father read about computers. Man, that's it. It creates the illusion that is doing something more by a cleverly done digital logic circuit.

He said, after a while I was thinking about it, he said, wait a minute. This whole book is talking about why everyone want to buy a computer and use one. The illusions they're talking about happen to be that it's doing useful work, which means you can get a good paying job doing this. No one says, oh yeah, the stage illusion

that you can produce is that it got payrolled on. It looks like you saw a leading half and restored it. No one says, hey, I got a stage illusion that looks like the payroll got processed. But a computer, you can give the illusion that can do payroll processing. Yeah. You can do illusion in solving equations.

And I think that really factors into some of his, like early work with making games and, like, books and such to try and introduce computing to, like, kids in the broader public. You know, he did the thinkadat, which is reasonably successful, like a little board, I guess it's not really a board game. Plastic toy. Plastic toy, yes. It's plastic flip-flops.

Yes. In a digital logic circuit. Yep. And you're right. everything was, once you realize that all you're talking about is you'd like to work with a programmable circuit that is just on-off switches. There's no reason you can't use other representations on-off switches in little circuits to introduce people to the idea that, well, if you did more of these and more complicated, you'd be designing computers. And just like I sort, I like baseball card trading when I was good. So I was forever sorting them into numerical order, figuring out which ones I was missing.

And then sorting them back in by team because the kids in the playground wanted to trade you by team. So I was always sorting in, I got some parts, I sort, I re-sort. And I got really good at inventing sorting algorithms that were more efficient because I had to. And then I went off to college and I got a class in programming. And they had names. It was bucket sort. It was insertion sort. And they were saying why things were, and other people are all in there asking me,

how do you remember that? And I'm picturing, wait a minute, that sounds familiar. I decided that laying everything out on the bedroom floor and leaving space for the gaps and trying to, so I could fit in the cards, insertion sort. At some places I would run out of room. And then so I decided I'll deal them out in stacks of zeros, tens, 20s, of the 250s, and then I'll hand sort those and then pile them off. Oh, you know, this is a known solution of the story.

My father had to say, he said, yes. He discovered it in his life. Something you do, you say, wait a minute, that sounds familiar. Here's the general algorithm for doing that. But you had the problem. You solved it yourself trial and error. And you came to the same conclusion. So he wanted to have toys and games and puzzles in kids' hands,

though that when they play with them, someday later in their life, when they run into it in digital logic or computer. computer programming, they're going to say, wait a minute, that description sounds familiar. I've done something like that. I understand it. Wait a minute. Right. So it wasn't so much he wanted to teach people about computers and digital logic. He wanted to have practical experiences that involve digital logic or the kind of thought process

of writing a program. So that later on, when you encounter it, you recognize that's all they're talking about. Stuff you already did. It makes sense. to you. Yeah, it's a, and I think, you know, that sort of interest in education through play is very important because, you know, when he started building his own, like, hobby computer around, what, 1969, 70, about? Like that, that's... He's been designing this computer since 1953. So when you say, when he started... Fair enough. Which project do you mean that the technology was finally there to make it a practical end project as a project? goes to, it's the same design philosophy and theory throughout, waiting for the technology

to let you implement. But again, the toys and the books are because the only technology you had was injection molding plastic or printing on paper. So his stuff was digital logic represented on paper and pencil or in plastic flip-flops. And it wasn't like during that time he wasn't designing a small computer. So he had been designing this for years prior to actually starting to build it. Yes. What he said on the first date with my mother back in, less than in 1954 or 55. I have figured out once for which.

But it was the fall. He was going into his last year at Drexel and the five-year co-op. Mom had just graduated and gotten her first teaching job at a third grade teacher. And they met the fall at a dance. Back in the days when there were actually places you went and the dance. so you can meet people and they were at the dance and you're there as a mixer

so dances and mom asks him what he's doing and he said well Drexel co-op student electrical engineering and I'm working on the Bismack was a huge computer room full equipment and computers are really great I'm really lucky to have this is this is all I would do for a living

and it's just on-off switches so but it's really yeah it's what you do with the on-off switches and it's really fascinating and that's what I'm going to do. And the great thing is right now it's three rooms full of equipment on a computer. But they're really useful and they're going to get smaller because there are only switch on-off switches. So their physicists are working on making small, fast, cool-running, tiny, fast, cool-running,

reliable on-off switches. And so they're coming. So you can design a computer that could be small that is large now, but you can't design a computer that's large now that could be small. He said, so the only difference is at some point you still need to have people interact with it, which means wires that are full size,

which means as you shrink three rooms of equipment down the palm of your hand, you don't care with three rooms of equipment. If every terminal is connected and every tape drive is connected on someone, wire, it gets down on the palm of your hand, you want as few things directly connected as possible. I'm working on designing that part of it so that you can still make a mainframe, but they'll automatically shrink down with the architecture. And mom said, oh, fast,

slow, fast running slow, low power switches. Why are you, why are you working on that? My father said, because I'm not a physicist. I'm a control logic designer. So that's not the fun I'm not going to spend my life not working on the fun part. And dad said, at that moment, I realized I'm marrying this person. And my mother said later, and telling him, well, I took one more date to be sure, but I was pretty sure he's with the law I'm going to marry. Because up until then, everybody was very childlike, immature. And the first date they had with somebody else who was actually a grown-up.

And not just a grown-up, but not resigning miserable in their life. A grown up who had enjoyment that he'd get out of life and knew how they were going to work that around a day job. And a person who said, yeah, that's great. That's who I want to tie it as a husband. Someone who is not going to wind up a miserable son-a-gung soured on life in 10 years because he chased money in a way that he hated.

It does not have a hobby that brings him any joy. I also said, you can choose your hobbies and exactly how you do it. So you might as well choose a hobby that might bring in money. Yeah. You know, so if you like something, figure out those same skills and something that you could sell in a slide.

If you don't make any money off it, it was a hobby anyway. Yeah. But maybe you do. So he's starting to design this. Oh, and he said they'll be in your refrigerator, they'll be everywhere where they're small and cheap. They'll be in your refrigerator,

they'll be in your toaster, you know, they'll be everywhere. So at the time when I hear these stories and you're a kid, you don't think anything of it. because you don't know computers. But now, looking back, people are going, oh, when did people first start thinking to make embedded controllers out of computers? At least since the 50s.

My father read about computers, and he said, when they're small, you don't need to be data processing. You can be controlling things. Yeah. And the only reason they're used for data processing only is you can't use $2 million, and three rooms of equipment

to control an industrial process. But if it was a $2 part that fits in the palm of your hand, you can build the computer right into your industrial equipment. And the only reason to do it is control it. And I think that, like, this is good because it, like, sets apart

what makes the unit he was building at home, the fred, the flexible recreation education device. It kind of really sets it apart from what people generally considered computers at the time. It also explains why everyone says that have a very unusual architecture. Yes. Well, if you're designing a microtroller in the days of mainframes, you're going to wind up a very different architecture.

It's a very strange architecture. I remember when I was talking to people about the Fred architecture, and they're like, yeah, it just has like this really big scratch pad memory area, which is like very strange for a microprocessor, but like it really worked out here. How about you got a scoop? Your podcast has high. Evacuate the building.

We had a threat call in. Yes. Sorry about that little break. We apparently had a bomb threat at the event. So they had to evacuate the building. So the rest of this will be brought to you from my car. From the safe distance in your bomb-proof car? I don't want to test that.

That's not tent fate. We'll go with that. So, where was I? Before we got broke off. So we were talking about the Fred, the flexible recreation education device, and how it has unusual architecture, like the large scratch pad, because it's not super fast, so you want to be able to do a lot of things in one time. Oh, that's an interesting statement.

That was the reason for what you think? I'm just, I'm working off of my recollection from interviewing other people who worked the machine, yeah. Right. Would you sort of like to hear? Yeah, I'd like to hear more. What I heard was the explanation for those guys had registered. Sure, go for it.

In order to keep the gate count low so that RCA could do it in Seimos, which the gates were all larger and you couldn't fit as many on a chip, plus it's early days. And it's the next step up from medium. scale integration. So the in-house capacity to RCA is not a huge amount of gates. They keep the big account low. He's looking for everything that doesn't require hardware and you can push into software. And he's looking for a hardware architecture that uses a few of skates. He said, so one of the things is you wind up with a general purpose scratch pad memory. And if you need extra variables at the machine level language, at machine code level, you can use

and as extra variables, as extra registers. You don't need to give people how you hear your registers for temporary storage. Okay. And you can have multiple program counters so you can have multiple stacks. Oh, here you go. Okay. And the X register

is a stack for doing calculations on. The P register is the program counter. I'm sorry, let's use software to the pointer. X is the pointer to the to the register you're going to use

to keep track of stacks and arithmetic operations for operands. P is the pointer you're going to use to get the program counter out of this register stack. And N is anything you're currently using in the instruction that has to say

I like to specify a register with the instruction, N holds what that instruction says which register you use. And if you're not using a register, N is a parameter that gets decoded. Like what matters, operation or logic operation you've been used. So you can have a small instruction word and dual purpose. The other part, instead of the op code, the parameter is either the what register

you want to point to, or it's the additional op code you need for a really complicated operation. Most computer architectures, they just give you more registers. And they say, this is the register you have to use when you use this operation. And not only does it make it a longer op code, okay, and it also means that you have more gates because every data path has to be hard word and every op code has to be decode to something that says that register to that other register. Whereas if you just have a table, a lookup table, and you've got three registers you can use a point to the lookup table, you know, he tested the things, ride things out, three pointers

into a lookup table is perfectly fine. You don't really need to get that more complicated. And it gives you the opportunity to implement stacks and a push-down, pop-up stacks, because you don't have to save a pointer to the program

or something else you're doing. You have one register that points to where the stack beginning or end is. So that, and other people's solution was a longer restruction word. And more circuitry. Right. And, you know, his initial unit, this was pre-microcessors on integrated circuits.

So it was all like TTR logic, transistor, transistor logic. Yes. He was hand wire wrapping all the gates himself. Yeah. Which is why you want as few as possible. And I've seen the pictures inside of the prototype unit, and it is just a nightmare of breadboards and chips. It actually looks like Robbins attacked a rat's nest. That is a good description.

Right. It's inside a box. It was in the garage. You open it up, and the rats got in and pulled things, and the birds got in and started making a nest. There's some little structure to it, but obviously it was whatever wires the rats dragged in kind of thing. But you know what I really appreciate it is like it's kind of forward thinking in its design too,

because like this original unit, it had, if I was reading the documentation correctly, 1,024 bytes of memory, which, you know, at the time was not a huge amount, because like a mainframe, like RCA's own Spectra 70 that had anywhere between like 4 to 512 kilobytes of memory. No, the entry level Spectre 70 had something like 50,000, 64,000 bytes, and some IBM mainframe started out. earlier generation of the 360 had 4,000 bytes. Oh, were they already... On memories.

I mean, mainframe started out with a couple dozen bytes at most. Right. Because it's a new technology, and the RAM is expensive. Okay. So it's a constant recycle. The new technology is always limiting in the same ways because it's expensive to do. So you have the limit in the same way.

But what interested me is that, you know, the architecture, he set up for this machine could read up to like 64 kilobytes? Of course. Which is like... Because unlike Bill Gates, he was not going to tie the hands of anyone who's going to use a system and say, you'll never need more than this much memory, so therefore there's only one way to address it, and you can only address up to this much. Yeah.

And that was the whole design philosophy. If you, at any point you had a decision to make that would limit what you could do with something else, you push that in the software, and you left it up. at the time you write the application program, do it the way you need. And his design philosophy was make it easy to explain. It's going to be lots of pieces

connected and complicated ways. So you're never going to make it easy to understand. But if you made it easy to explain what's going on, then people would dial down into each piece themselves and could figure it out and were motivated to try. After wire wrapping, the first two prototypes, the system is here on the Fred,

he said, I'm glad I'm doing a microprocessor. Don't want to deal with this anymore. Right, because I never want to wire wrap a prototype of this CPU again just to try out a couple ideas. And I'm double-checking to make sure that the part that goes into the chip

is only the part I never want to change and is tedious and I just need to wire-wrap it again just to get back to play with an interesting part. and I want all the interesting parts to be pushed into software so when I can buy one I can try out different ideas that I had in software

I don't care if it runs slow I don't have to build it again and I want to make sure I don't accidentally lock something into the hardware that I want to play with an option later on so that's why so much was pushed into the software because he said you know I'd like to buy these things

and play with additional architecture designs how many staff what sizes, different things. I don't want to accidentally push some of that onto the chip, and then my hands are tied. Right, right, right. Yeah, and I mean, shrinking this down from, like, what, 14 or so, TTL for the microprocessor,

down to, like, one or two, like, integrated circuits for the microprocessor itself once they do the integration. Like, that's pretty huge. Yes, yes. But that's what he saw coming for a medium-scale integration. in the mainframes. He saw how much you could shrink things down and that they were still working on shrinking even more.

Yeah. So he could sort of judge. It feels very, like, very, like, prescient in how he was approaching it, which I appreciate. Well, it's not. The interesting thing was, after the 18th century actually got out, one day he said, you know,

right place at the right time, born at the right time. Charles Babbage was not born at the right place of the right time. He had the right ideas. And no way to implement them. Because when mechanical switches, the friction will kill you. There's only so many things you can do and turn a lever, and everything turns the response.

Okay? But his ideas were proven to be right. He says, I locked out because I really thought at the rate transistors and semiconductors were going. I was hoping that very large-scale integration would come in before I retired. So I would get to do all these things on a chip. he said and all of a sudden man those sun's guns they're really good

once he got medium scale integration you've got VLSI like before anyone expected you know there's no telling when you solve the practical problems

but once they solved it for medium skiller it turns out like man everyone said oh is that what works okay I think we know how to solve the rest of the problems let's start building fabs so he didn't

he anticipated that it would happen someday. But he was completely surprised by the fact that it happens decades ahead of what he thought it was going to take to work out the practical problems of semiconductors. Babbage and Lovelace would have loved an elf. So, you know, I did want

to touch, like, you know, what brought the thread to RCA? And it's like a sort of a series of events, like a cascade, if you will. So, like, RCA was in the computer business. We've talked about the Spectra 70. We talk about, you know, what your dad was working on. And And, you know, according to contemporary reporting, RCA wanted to make a major effort to overtake IBM in the computer market, which was absolutely bonkers because IBM was much, much bigger than every other player.

But they had a hope. And they spent an absurd amount of money on this effort around 69, 70. Consistent what I heard from my father, yes. Yes. And from what I was reading, like, this is really driven by people who worked at IBM and came to RCA and were like, well, we can just beat my old employer. I have ideas for a better thing. Let me be in charge and I'll be the IBM slayer. Yeah. And it turns out that they couldn't slay IBM because IBM had a lot of advances going on and just computer technology that RCA did not have the capacity to really keep up with. That RCAA was not willing to research so fast that they could keep up with IBM.

They were willing to look into it, but not was the scale that would have got even close to IBM, let it overtake them. Yeah. The way Robert Sarnoff, who was the president and CEO of RCA at the time put it in the press, is that it would take a $500 million investment over five years to compete with IBM, and they did not want to throw that kind of money at it. Yes. So they, in 1971, yep, they, uh... Fall of 71.

Fall 71, they closed the computer business. You think I would have written on that date in my notes, but I did not, but... I did review before we came. September of 71, I see press announcements. Yep. They sold their computer business to the Univac makers, a Sperry Rand. Oh, and I wonder, where were they headquartered? It was Massachusetts, wasn't it?

Oh, was it? What a coincidence? that three years before IBM had announced their moving the computer division to Marlboro, Massachusetts. Not that, as my father suspected, it was a sweetener for a potential buyer who wanted to see how much of the staff

went with it if they moved. No, no. It was IBM had all these reasons, RTE had all these good reasons that they were relocating to Marlabor, Massachusetts. Yeah, it's definitely nothing to do with Sperry Rand. What a coincidence is how things worked out. Isn't life funny? Digital equipment corporation being up there.

Right, yes. All sorts of things. potential buyers being located there. So now you had a bunch of people who worked on computers at RCA. The company just took a $250 million write-off on the whole division. What are they going to do next? And it's worse than that. It wasn't just the people who worked on computers who didn't move with them.

It was the entire semi-dignoftor division, solid state division in Somerville. What I remember hearing is that between 25% and 50% of, all their sales were in-house for RCA mainframe computers. Yeah, I would check out. Right, because they're transistorizing, making some detectors of different cards in their mainframes, and they're the ones fabricating them. Yeah. vision was looking for new products.

Yep. And your father, he had one right there. That's why he said right place, right time. Yeah, I remember hearing that he talked with Jerry Herzog, who was his boss, sometime before the closure of the computer business. And he sort of just was talking about this Fred machine and his supervisor's like, well, I bet you could use that as like a microprocessor as an in for RCA because we've got... And no, that's...

No, that's the impression you can get from the bits and pieces. What happened... Jerry Hurtzok was in charge... High up. I'm not sure how high up, but high enough up have a say in things in the semiconductor vision. Okay? And my father, when they announced that they were moving RCA

up to Marbleau of Massachusetts in the fall of 68, saw the writing on the wall, and he talked to my mother, and she said, look, if you want to move us the Massachusetts that's fine. Not really.

It moves the kids away from all the family and both sides of the family. And, you know, it's not like it's job security for life with RCA. You know?

Even if they don't sell the computer division, who's the say in five years and not getting out of it anyway? And now you're up in a strange town

when the relatives to move in with and you're on your own. Let's not. So he said, you know, I have a chance because the semiconductor

division now needs products. And a computer on a chip is a semiconductor product. So this might be a good time to convince them that maybe you'd like to do a computer on a chip.

And all this talking about, oh, I have good ideas for it, and I'm sure it would work, isn't going to cut it. I have a tight deadline to convince them before I have to start looking for a job. Because at some point, if they even stay in it, they're going to tell the Kandon employees from the computer division either move

tomorrow mortgage test users or leave. All right. So the clock is ticking. So my father said, I got to actually get an 8-fid microprocessor design done. So start Syracurzine 68 and by the summer of 1970, he had one built, the system 0-0. And the next thing was he talked to everyone he knew in RCA and saying, hey, I got an 8-bit computer that I built in my basement that only has like 6,000 transistors. It would fit on two chips that RCA can make at their current capability. anybody interested in doing this? And word reached Jerry Herzog in the semi-knock division

because he's too high for my dad to know and call. But he talked to somebody who talked to somebody who was in there who passed it up. And Jerry, it turns out, well, again, right place, the right time. He was a physicist who had started RCA when transistors are coming in and had worked his way up in management during the whole thing and was actively engaged in the research and work in transistors.

and semiconductors. And it turns out that his goal in life was to actually solve all the practical problems and putting an entire computer on a chip. And RCA was moving that way as they were transistorizing and putting a semiconductor more and more of the boards in a mainframe. And as it just to look like he was going to get to do it,

they got out of computers. And then someone says, well, you would like to put a whole computer on a chip? I got a little one that do it. And surprisingly, yes, call them up and say, But he said, the only problem is management is gun-shy about computers because top management just said we're not in computers anymore. He says, so we're going to have to tell them we're just building a semiconductor chip, but not to not call it a computer. And I said, yeah, I'm not sure about, you know, we'll have to think about it. He says, no, no, Jerry says, I got an idea.

RCA is in the business of making custom printed circuit boards for industrial control. And semiconductor division has been told, that's a very profitable business. We want to generate more business than that. Good news. Right. So maybe we have just discovered the answer to their question of how do we get more business and grow the custom printed circuit board business for OEMs of industrial equipment. Perhaps, he said, I'm thinking along the lines of we tell them it's a semiconductor alternative

to custom printed circuit board. with digital logic. And the cost savings is going to come that you have one standard chip that you do in high volume, and you're left with only one semiconductor chip that's custom for the customer.

And that's it. I think they'll buy that. Yeah, I mean, it's technically correct. It's a microprocessor in a wrong, you know? But if you don't say it, and you start out talking about the custom printed circuit board control logic business, you were actually talking about a microcontroller and a ROM,

which is an entirely different concept than a data processing system that competes with IBM. Yeah. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm pretty sure I've read this, at least in some of the oral histories and such, is that computer games was an early idea for him to, like, as a use case for this thing,

because what better way to expose people to computers than a game, because that's something you understand. Okay. Now, the question again is how early do you think? Because when he first read about computers and he wanted to build the minimal part of a computer that does the programmable part just to see if it worked,

and he realized how many pinball machine relays that was going to take? He gave up on it. And then on a trip to Franklin Institute, because he loved science museums in the Franklin Institute, he saw they had a relay pinball machine. I mean, relay tick-tac-toe machine. And he saw the size of the box.

He said, oh, if someone knows, you couldn't look inside it and they didn't say how it was done. He says, but that doesn't matter because I see the theory behind this thing. And it fit inside a reasonable size box. So someone figured out how to do it with a reasonable number of relays. So he built himself a tick-tac-toe machine. Yeah, that was like what? 53, 54. Right.

And in the Haguey Museum archives, there's a picture and a write-up of that Astric 1, which is the next generation Tic-Tac-Tome machine which shows the wiring diagram and the theory behind it and how you did it. And I think at least one of those machines is it the Strong Museum now?

Yes, I donate the original prototype and the original one he built to the Strong Museum of Play. Yeah, I remember... I couldn't find any documentation on it, but I sent along the Asterisk documentation because it's the same thing in a different box. Yeah. I remember when they got that

a friend of mine who works there sent me like a man. message, he's like, do you have any idea, like, what I should put this under? I'm like, well, that's probably this machine. I'm glad you said that, because that's what I say, when you said the idea of doing games on a computer, well, the first example he did when he couldn't do a general purpose computer was a fixed game using digital logic. Yeah.

So at what point are you asking, when did he think of doing games as an educational outreach Since the Tick-Tac tome machine out of pinball machine relays was, it hooked him. He was already primed to be more interested in that when he saw at the museum because he already knew about switching networks and logic with relays. He already knew it would work for him. So clearly it would work for other people. He was right.

He was very correct. And, you know, because this is RCA, before we started recording, you were talking about how RCA had a patent on the, Seymos process. They develop Seimos technologies proprietary. So they wanted, the money in RCA was licensing the intellectual property, not actually going into manufacturing.

So they did a lot of research into things like flat screen TVs out of vacuum, out of CRT, out of tubes. Yeah. Because it probably wasn't practical, but you'd find out a lot of useful things and get a lot of useful patents to other industries along the way, which they could license and make money that funded the research. Yeah. So they would do these what looked like pie in the sky research.

search projects, but they might develop into something else and they didn't. Someone else might be able to license the patents and do something with it. So they're still funding. So that's RCA management mindset is if it looks like you'll make a lot of breakthroughs on the way to solving the problem you want to solve, you can make money off those breakthroughs even if you don't exploit them. Yeah. But like what let's, yeah, let me start that part over there. And what's interesting to me is that they had this CMOS process, but at the time there was also other, you know, I-C technologies like P-Moss and N-Moss. And N-Moss is what a lot of other microprocessors from the 70s ended up using,

you know, because it tended to be quicker as what I was understanding and smaller. Like in the late 80s or the early 90s, I finally read in a trade magazine, and it's the latest whatever microprocessor. on it's Seimos, of course, because it's so much better than everything else. Oh, let me go back and read the articles

in the 70s that RCA was fighting the reputation that Seimos is a dead-end technology because, yeah, it has some nice advantages over N-MOS and P-MOS, but the deal breaker

is each gate is so much larger. You'll never be able fit enough on a chip to do anything practical. And that's just going to kill it. You might as well go MOS and PMOs. And yeah, they admit there's a lot of nice things about CMOS. But it's not practical.

Right, it's not practical and it never will be. And then like 20 years later, it's like, well, of course it's CMOS. Everything has done that because it's so much advantage. When you have real estate despair on the chip, yeah, go with it. Yeah, miniaturization really worked out great for CMOs eventually. Right, right. But RCA was fighting that reputation in the industry that you shouldn't go CMOs because it's not practical. So they were, the semiconductor division was tasked with trying to find enough chips

that with enough circuits that would fit on a chip with CMOS to be practical so that you could compete and say, hey, there's plenty of room for this many transistors on it. And if you use them CMOS, it performs so much better than the competition. Oh yeah, has a lot of extra space in their chip. But what do you care if you have extra space on their chip? Doesn't benefit you. So that's what Jerry Hurstor was saying. tasks with finding more Seimos chips we can do. Somebody has the MyPet project, a computer on a chip, and he says it's few enough transistors, you'll probably be able to fit it on RCA-C-Mose circuits. He said, we're pitching that because I think we can get that through. Just don't call it a computer.

Call it really complicated control logic. And so, it's big because it's general purpose, so we can customize on the other chip for the customer. Which is exactly what they did, really. Right. And I know that, I mean, it took a little while for their fabrication technology to really sort of catch up with that concept. Well, they were only doing in-house. Right. And they were only doing converting printed circuit boards for their mainframes as much onto a chip as they could get.

So they didn't really need to push what they could put on a chip. Right. So it took a couple years before they actually had, like, the equipment and everything so that they could have. actually can, like, compress this into first-to-two-chip microprocessor, the 1801, and then the one-chip 1802, which is really confusing with those numbers. Like, they make sense. Okay. You want another confusing thing?

Go for it. I came across an in-house RCA publication about progress reports through the year and was it happened, and I saw a sense I'd never seen anywhere else that explains a lot of things about it. It says the 1802 is being announced that it's either had recently or will recently be out in test quantities. So this is a year summary in the announcement. And it says, unlike the Fred and the 1801, we had to go to a bit-slice architecture to

fit it on the 1802. I have no idea what a bit-slice is. Right. But what it is is it's not TTL. And it's not the same architecture. It's not the same circuit design internally. So when you see the disk, the dye image, you're not going to find. fine things that go with the wiring diagram of the Fred or anything about the 1801.

The block of register RAM is going to be there. The I.O. lines are, but the internal structure is going to look different because it's not TTL circuits. It's a bit-slice approach to the logic design. And that's just out there for the guys who are trying to like look at the die and say, I can't spot where the logic blocks are. That's because they're not looking for the right kind. I bet there's some hardcore hardware nerds on this Oh, that's why I want to put that out there.

This is a hint as to why you can't match up what you see on the die to what you think the architecture is is the different architecture than you think. You've got an exclusive on your podcast. There you go. But it's not like they were doing nothing

while they were waiting for this like hardware side to like spool up because they were like experimenting with these Fred units and they built the, I think, Was it 14 of them at RCA? Something like that. My father never knew an accurate count because, like, I am not wire wrapping another one. Right.

Let the other guys at RCA try out their ideas for differences in architecture I.O. by wire wrapping one from scratch. I'm waiting until the 1801 comes out, and I am making Fred prototypes where I can start with a two-chiff 1801 and then play with additional options. I think there might have only been like seven wire rat models. It's in one of the books I've seen, but it doesn't really matter how many there were. The first wire raft is his. Wire wraps are other people.

And then when the 1801 ship is available in test quantities, you know, some are dads, some are somebody else's. Yeah. I've seen a lot of the different like prototype 1801 machines that he built for playing around with. That's because the enthusiasm for being able to play out, play hardware options. Now that you didn't have the wire wrap, the whole darn basic thing to get to the point where you had these.

It was so great that everyone couldn't wait to do it. So, like, that staff at the, at RCA, they were working on stuff like a 16 key keypad that, like, plugged into where the card, the punch card reader was on the, like, the original unit. They developed a light gun. Oh, my father did that for Fred. Yep. That was, you know, the gravity feed card reader and the light gun were dad's suggestions for the kind of peripherals you could have with a system like that to show that it, just because it was simple. Yeah. It didn't mean you were locked into only doing simple interfaces of simple devices.

And the light gun is neat because I saw in the documentation, like he was writing about the Magnobox Odyssey's light gun. And I believe the prototype at the College of New Jersey, I don't know if it's the prototype. But there is an Odyssey light gun in there, and I'm kind of wondering if he just, like, converted it to use it. Oh, no, no, no. He bought it to see how they did it. Okay. Okay. And he saw how complicated and expensive it was going to be.

He sat down and did it another way. And when you look at the wiring diagram and one of the Fred notes, if you look at it, it's like, oh, darn, I thought this was going to be a nice project. This is like nothing. This is like, oh, I want to wire up a battery at a switch and a light bulb kind of level of complexity. Yeah.

And explain to me, my sister, how it worked. He said, to be reliable in a home, you have, the power supply is a 60 hertz hum throughout everything, which could have flicker on the screen, but you can't perceive it, so no one bothers it.

However, you have a light gun. You have to know if you're looking at a target or not, and you have to account for the fact it might be flickering. Fast enough that the LED that's sensing the light

can vary with it. So you have to cope with that. He says, so what he does is the games that use the light gun, the target flickers slower than 60 hertz a second but still fast enough

that it's not perceptible so when you're pointed at the target it knows that the frequency is right register hit and it's pointing at anything else that isn't that frequency you're not hitting it which allows you to have more than one target if you want to change the software

so it looks at two different frequencies and this way you can't just point it in a light bulb and win automatically there you go it doesn't man the ambient ambient lighting, the glare, you think it's mysterious how it does it. How does it know that that's the white dot that I want to have as the target? But if you're fast enough responses, it's the flickering white dot at that rate. My other favorite thing is like they developed like standards for saving and loading onto cassette, which thank God, better than punch cards. But the big thing for

me that I find really fun is that they use this cassette interface to get sort of audio in some of these games that they were working on because they were making games for the Fred at RCA and apparently at your house as well. They're the best demonstration of the power of the computer in a way that people are actually interested in watching the entire demo. That's my father looked at it. You need a demo that shows off everything you can do with it. But you need to do it in a way that people don't get bored halfway through.

Or they can see that it has to take something to do it. You know, that it must be complicated. The computer has lots of capacity to do different things. And games, like, you know, fit the bill. Yeah. So there was a, there's one that really comes to mind because the former curator of the College of New Jersey Sarnoff collection, Flory Pierre got to deal with a lot of these tapes.

Oh, are you going to say, yes. The bait of her existence, yes. It's the bowling tapes. Right. But there's a few of them. like these early Fred ones where they'll load the program, and then the computer will tell the tape to stop, and then when you actually throw the ball in the game,

it will play a sound that your father recorded in a bowling alley of just a sound of a ball going down and hitting pins. Yes. I'd like to describe it for the people who think they're old, but we actually consider them young. It's the equivalent of a CD-ROM game, where you have full motion video. Yeah.

Okay, it was before you had video. This is audio, live-recorded audio, that you play in the middle of your game, and you don't have to generate it. It's the original multimedia experience. No, I like to think of it is the guy who do full motion video stole the idea from the audio people on a cassette tape. Oh, we have a CD-ROM now. We can put video in with it. Perfect. Skip to it, play that, go back to where you load the next.

level. Same idea. Yeah. Yeah. And like a lot of these games are emulated. Like you can play them of Marcel van Tongarin. I hope I'm pronouncing that correct. I am not going to attempt to it because I can spell it, but I don't want to insult Marcel by not pronouncing the name. But he's a lovely man in Europe and he made an emulator for all of these like platforms called Emma Zero2, which has its own website. If you want to try any of these out, We have digitized a lot of these programs, and, like, he's got him as binaries. They're bundled with the emulator, which is very nice. And I just look like to thank, Marcel, for all the work he's done and everyone involved in getting the tapes saved and converted and preserve.

Because the car call Emma 2, the Emma 02, an emulator is really doing injustice. Okay? it is a museum of software for 1802 systems that were publicly available systems. And so that weren't publicly available. A very, yeah, even a few that were in-house development things. But practically every system that was ever available to the public based on an 1802, it emulates the software for that. And it also explains things.

and has a documentation with it. So it's more of a museum of software for 1802 systems than just an emulator that handles lots of different machines. And you know what? If you have the wave file for these bowling games, you can have that same experience if you want to, like, futz with the emulator because it does, like, emulate all the switches and everything.

Another part of that is that as I've... I've... several point to be up to go through the artifacts they found and try to identify the physical artifacts. And I happen to be there, and Perry is working on splicing audio tapes and recording. And while I'm there, Barry, Florey says, by the way, we have these tapes, and they're not Fred tapes. You don't want them back or your family tapes or something.

One says Christmas music, and I said, you didn't play. No, it says Christmas music. I said, no, it's pin eight for the super sound card. It's Christmas music for the VIP. If you play it, it's a program. It just plays music. Oh, okay. And she says, I have this one.

It's a woman's voice on it. Is that family member? You want to know, no. R.D. had bought Random House. So my father was pitching. You can use it for educational materials because they publish, and you publish, you know, books with it. And here's how you could use computers. So he had an example of educational materials that.

that included stop and start for voice. And he says, your mother has a nice speaking voice. And she's a third grade teacher. She has street credit among the educational materials people at random house. So I had her record the audio. And it was like the program would load and they would give you instruction, you know, screen that they would give you audio instructions of what to do. And it paused until you did it.

And then they would advance in the next section. and if they quizzed you, you had it right, you'd have a voice that was right or that was wrong, try again. Again, you could skip ahead. And you have to really look at the circuitry for the cassette interface to know how you could fast forward out playing, and the computer knew you'd skip the section

and where to start again. And the only problem is you couldn't rewind. Right. So hence, the bowling sound effects, if you're going to play bowling, you can only play as many games in a row before you reround the cassette, reloaded the game, as you had sections of the same rolling down the lane and hitting the pins.

I do remember hearing the story of the, because they actually did take one of the freds out to test the educational materials. Oh, I hadn't heard about how that went. Oh, boy. So I believe it was Tony Roby who was explaining this to me, because I think he was the one who got roped into it. I know my dad had nothing to do with it. So he went out to a few different schools, I think in the Philadelphia district,

and it didn't go so well because they needed a power outlet for the computer and a power outlet for the TV, and I think they needed an outlet for something else. A cassette recorder. Yes. And most school districts did not have that many outlets in their school rooms. So he got there and was like, I can't plug all this stuff in because there's only one outlet in here.

I guess I can't actually do anything with this. So they shelved the whole thing. But the thought was there and it probably would have gotten somewhere because schools were using teletypes in this time period. Oh, yeah. They were leasing time on a mainframe or a minicomputer

at a nearby university who would loan them the teletypes. And yes, that was California, that was a huge thing for people's computer company, the newsletter, David All, and the three-headed dragon. Well, that's what his target market was at the time. It was high school students who had access to a university computer

through a teletype machine. Dartmouth time-sharing system, same thing. So, yeah, good idea. Didn't quite work out. Well, an idea that was head of its time. Yes, well, we can go with that, because the Fred could have been the Apple II of the 70s if the infrastructure was there for it.

Well, no, because it was never designed for high performance. And all the successful home PCs for computer games and the video game consoles did really good performance, and they pushed the limits of the performance. I was thinking, but in terms of, like, the Apple 2 in the mid-80s was not a very, like, high-powered machine at that point. But it was still, it was still intended to be more high-power throughput than the 18-02. The 18-2, remember, my father's vision of mainframe computers, was eventually they would be handheld microcontrollers built into equipment. Which is not wrong from where the big stand now. Which is a certain style of game different than running a game on a full-fledged computer.

Right. So, yes, there were some kinds of games that it could compete it with, but really you need a... And again, I don't want to start the age old war here of, do you want to design your computer game on a computer platform, or the video game platform, and each time there's a new generation of PCs, it's better to play it on that because it were, and then the next generation of consoles comes out, and it's better than the PC, and they keep leaf fogging. But yeah, you need that kind of future power.

And that wasn't the design goal of the 18-10-2. Design goal was adequate performance and cheapest cost. I do want to note that you also wrote a game for this Fred computer, like, in these early days and your father sort of brought it to work and showed everyone and wrote about it in some of their memos of like, here's what games we have. So like, I'm curious, what got you to like working on the Fred and like playing around with it? Oh yeah. My father treated me just like an adult, you know, or let's let's, okay, as my father, I'm going to channel my father now. I hear my father's voice saying, or maybe it's more like

The guys I worked were more like 14 and 50-year-old kids. So I treated you the same because you were a 14- or 15-year-old kid at the time. I mean, I can't let that go when you're talking about. My dad, I hear my dad saying, no, actually, this is how I'd phrase it. And I'd hope we'd get back to the guys in the group. Try to deny it. We try to hide it from RCA management. It's like, hey, it's a bunch of.

kids playing with this stuff and you're allowing us to play with all this stuff, but we don't want management to know, so we act like adults when the management comes around. So, yes, he included things I did that he took in, just like anyone else in the group's contribution of here are some games that will run on the Fred. And when the VIP came out,

and they needed, okay, I was almost going to say they needed games for the manual. They didn't want games for Fred. As you know, that was. would not be a proper statement that would imply RCA wanted something. It's my father wanted games in the manual because he'd always use games to demonstrate the capacity of the Fred.

Which is something that RCA developers did, like, even before the Fred, like, when they did their open house in the 60s, they had their computer pool game and their computer maze game because they knew, like, people are going to want something they can understand and not just a bunch of, you know, equations. And speaking of that, they had an exhibit of how. does how does electricity work. And they had a whole exhibit with a little diorama of

showing you Maxwell's demons pushing the electrons down the device and they had every device, a resistor. And the little Maxwell's demon cartoon cutouts were pushing against really hard against the resistance. And they were doing seesaws on the capacitors.

It was a little display of window box by window box of exactly how all these electronic components work. in terms of Maxwell's demons pushing electrons and showing the kids who came by,

see, this is how it works inside, this is why they work. So in the tradition of that. Yeah, yeah. And then, no, he said, okay, so here is my draft copy of the Instruction Manual, and here's where the games

are going to go. In the program listings, we have these games tend to go in it. And RCA put on the brakes, it says, no, no, no. And that's, well, you know, you've seen the demo,

we always have, it makes a direct demonstration, it motivates the person who buys this to put these games in, so they have something to show their family or friends, you know. And no, we want things like, you know, the combination lock and, you know, it's a logic probe or something. You know, all the practical things you could fit in something really small. All the hits. Oh, yeah, all the things that, yeah, I'm going to show my neighbors that.

This is a really cool thing I have. But the reason they were adamant against it was, my father said and I brought it on myself. The way I pitch that you even do the micro-tutor and the VIP was because you can't say it's hobby computer because that's too small market.

He said, so the sales pitch was this is a self-study course for engineers who work for equipment manufacturers who the company wants to get into microprocessor controllers. This is a self-study course. Now, we'll go out and do training, but if you work at a smaller company or you're on your own and you want to learn it, we need an affordable, self-contained, self-study

course in embedded microprocessor design, including the hardware interfacing to it. Okay. And we might as well sell it to the public for parents who want to buy it for their kids to learn about it, too, to increase sales. And hence, the games. Let's see, the Microtutor, like, it was like an 1801. It's like the training computer, but it's not too fundamentally different from what the Cosmack VIP was really designed around. Nothing is fundamentally different for anything.

Yeah. Because it's what you're able to do chiefly with the technology at the time. So the microtutor was the two-chip 1801, bare-bones version, it would then become the elf would be the elf. Yeah. And the VIP, if you look at it, actually looks like an elf with all the experience. expansion cars that my father wrote about actually built into the printed circuit board for the motherboard with the new expansion boards put in in slots. I did make a note of that.

Yes. So it's not just to look similar. That was the design philosophy. It was we can't do it yet because the parts are too expensive. So we'll strip it down to an elf. And then we'll show you how to make your own auxiliary circuits to it. But it's designed. We can just get out there.

Rob, because at some point we're actually to build on a motherboard, on one-printed circuit board, but we're waiting for that to be cost-effective, and that'll be the VIP. But in the meantime, here you go, building yourself. Yeah, that's the other fun thing that's worth noting is, like, the elf is not an RCA product. This was something your dad wrote about for popular electronics in a series of articles. It's like, here's how you can build your own computer using this 1802 micro processor from RCA,

and here's some of the cool stuff you can do with it. And again, it's my father's philosophy of you want to do something that's like this or you want to build a kit. And I'm going to make it so that in order to build the kit, you have to learn how everything works. I'm not going to give the option of just learning how to solder things together according to the schematic. And it works and you can't explain it. I'm going to explain assembling the kit in a way that along the way you understand how obviously you work. So when you show it to someone, they say, how is it? it do that or how you can just tell them because you learned it as you went.

And like, you know, as opposed to saying, and if you want to know how these refer to this book or, you know, this textbook or something. And he even has a little sidebar of how to program it. Yeah. And like this was an era when like people were, if they were getting a computer at all, because it wasn't that easy. It was like out of a kit or like how to build it yourself. The only affordable way because you couldn't, you couldn't afford the parts alone, let alone pay someone for the assembly. Yeah. Yeah, like, I remember reading something. It's like, yeah, you could get an elf pre-assembled, but it's going to be like $500. Exactly. As opposed to like, what, $250, 270 for all the parts? Yes, you can buy a Volkswagen, but if you want to assemble, it's going to cost

you another $1,000. Yeah, yeah. So, like, it's actually been pretty prolific as, like, a hardware design because, like, they weren't here this year, but I know in previous VCs, there's been someone selling like, here's an elf and an altoyed. Yes. He couldn't be here this year, but we're hoping he comes back next year. Yeah. It's like, and there's still elf, like, user groups. And like, I think that, is it Google groups?

It's whatever everyone moved off. It used to be, it used to be Yahoo groups and else groups. That was it. Cosmac elf. Yes. And they're very, they're very busy there. I think I'm a member, but I don't have their like notifications on Because there's just so much email traffic.

Well, between the replica kits that are out there and people want to add things on interfaces and say, I'm having trouble with this. You know, can you advise me how to expand it? And the people are saying, I want to put this in my basic kit and do a printed circuit word. Anyone else want to buy one? I have to do it in minimum of 10 PCPs.

Anyone want it? And yes, yes, yes. And can I get the entire set of parts with it? Oh, yeah, okay. It's very active. Yeah. And I just like to say, if you look in the VIP instruction manual, I think it's page 20, at the end of a section, to end of a chapter, before they get in the, at the very last paragraph, in the middle somewhere, it explains that they're using the latest technology and a very, and the way the architecture is done on it with a sentence that says, this, this machine, this computer

should not be obsolete soon. Should not. Right. Or we're not will not be obsolete soon to assure you that if you buy this

it's not going to be somebody else next year in a fasting fact. But I know and the way they phrase it would have to look it up again but that the VIP

will not soon be obsolete. And I'm looking at it and this was printed 50 years ago this year. So I'm thinking, I think we can say, yeah, that prediction came through. Yeah. People still finding uses for it. Oh, man. But like, this wasn't the only thing. Like, I feel like the computer line, like the elf and the VIP, this is like really what your dad was most interested in out of all of these like 1802 projects and products. Can I tell you when you said

the elf was not an RCA product? Yeah. Well, if you're going to say that, the microtutor and the VIP were not RCA products. Okay? What it was, it was the same design by the same person with different capability depending on where the price point was. Okay. So, yeah, Elf was not made by RCA and sold by RCA. Yes.

But the fact that my dad developed it and was able to convince RCA to make the microtutor and the VIP, but he didn't want to pitch the RCA and the VIP, but he didn't want to pitch the... the ELF to them. Okay, it was Adam about that thing. He used to tell me, I have to get the ELF articles finished and out there before RCA pulls the plug in the ATO2. And in-house, they won't give me permission to publish anything about the A, because you had to get clearance that it didn't, you know, you weren't, you know, scoffing at

RCA products or anything. Not that they were cared about it, but that, you know, we won't do anything damaging to the RCA brand. He says, but if he stopped making the ATO2, they communicate. Department is just going to say, no, we don't need anything published about the 1802. Right. And I have to get it out there because once it's out in the wild, even if you never get back copies are available, people have photocopied it and recirculating it. And it will never be able to disappear.

They will always have access to it. Sure enough. And surprisingly, it was so popular that other people start making kits and selling them to you. Yeah. And at one point my mother said, uh, how come you didn't make a kit and how come you're not suing them to not make kits? And I said, well, you're allowed to make kits, you know.

That's, he said, and you may be, I could threaten them that they wouldn't know better. He says, but, you know, honestly, the possible money you might make off a kit is not worth the time and energy to run the kit selling company. And he said, and if they can get this in the hands of more people without involving me and costing me any money, More power to them. I'd like to encourage as many companies that want to make variations on the elf. What would be their problem?

Yeah, exactly. And I don't see anything about those companies that sold those kits that said, and they became this multi-million dollar of Jeber-Not in the industry. Yeah, they're all just like these little companies, like with names that are extremely

70s computer-coded, like neutronics and whatnot. Right, right. In Australia and in European countries that didn't even have a computer industry, but they had a computer magazine and hobby kits. Again, they're nice family-run businesses. But if you already got a nice paying job at RCA and you have every free moment designing

new products for them, and as dad said, I get to work on my own ideas, they pay me a good salary to do it and have access to all their resources to see it as a product, what the heck am I going to do on a side gig trying to make money? off kids. Exactly. But, yeah, we used it for other things, too. So, like, the 1801 was used

in the, like, coin-op arcade system, which is very interesting because it, like, leads into this parallel development into, like, home video games. Well, my father believed that he was not a scientist. Okay?

He was a control logic designer, computer designer. He said, the difference is he wasn't interested in pure research. He was interested in the technology that, how you would use that technology to get better products out in a certain product category. He said, so when RCA decided to make the 1802, they moved the people who were involved from Camden to the labs to work on it. And I said, but the labs is the research part with all the pure scientists, physicists in it. And they said, they said, so I sort of felt that my role in that group of people was to develop a product, consumer product line that RCA could either produce themselves or license to other manufacturers.

And that would be my contribution because I'm doing pre-research and everyone else is in the technology. So I could use designing products around it. And again, the pitch was RCA wants to be in the chip business. So they want volume sales of 1802s. They don't want to get into a new consumer product line. Right. Okay. So my dad's argument, because my dad wants as many consumer products out there

so that people will see them, wonder what's inside them, find out of the E2, find out the Elf article, and get into, ooh, hardware and software is a really cool hobby. So he wants the word out because this is advertising to say, hey, have you checked out things you can do with the 802? There's a whole kit you can buy. And the pitched RCA again was, okay, we know it's two small potatoes. even if we were next Pong, Pong is too small for RCA to bother with. Right. Okay.

RCA was huge. Right, right. And you're not ever going to make a dent in the bottom line. The rounding error on the rounding error is less, you know, is bigger than what this would possibly be if you had a runaway bestseller. Get that, okay? But he said, you'll look at it this way. You want to sell lots of chips.

This is a new expensive chip. People have to understand how to use it. and there's a learning curve. If you consider the budget for the Fredtronic arcade game and the Studio 2 and the VIP and the Microtutor, the development budget and the manufacturing budget, as part of the advertising budget, it's actually a cheap way of getting the word out

to the people who are likely to design equipment using the 1802 and be your potential customers in volume later on. Either they're people who are getting into engineering and future, they will already be familiar with the 1802 and therefore recommended it at their company, or they're self-studying and the company is talking about making people have to learn how to program a microprocomputer, and they're avoiding it, and they bring home a video game or they play in an arcade, and, you know, they're technicalized, so they're interested in they find out it's in 180-200, oh, well, maybe, you know, maybe I'll self-study and learn how to use that one,

and I'll keep, you know, maybe I keep my job that way. So it's advertising and it's the cheapest way to reach the target market you want. And the pop electronic circles should be approved for RCA for publication because that's going to be the free self-training, self-study course. That doesn't cost RCA any money because the self-study course. So it was all geared towards, yeah, I think it was consumer products, but if you're not interested in it, how about we say this? If the budding product designers don't see examples of the kind of products you can do with an 1802, they may not choose an 1802 to do it with. Which is very interesting when you put it that way, because like...

Make a little more sense about... Yeah, because like the Fredtronic, this was like one of the very first arcade examples of using a microprocessor. Yes, and it was the first one to use replaceable ROMs. Yes, the designs talk about being able to swap cartridges out. I've seen a prototype of the, sort of the successor of this, was basically a consolized version of the coin-op board, and the cartridges for that are just straight-up video game cartridges. Right. And again, the video, the Spector 70,

as they were converting things over to semiconductors to place circuit boards, those new cards plugged in. They had plug in the printed circuit boards and now plug in boards with chips on it to replace those pieces because they weren't replacing the mainframe wholesale. So the idea that you could swap things out, of course, if you have something on a ROM, you'd want to put it on its own board

and be able to plug it in and change it. So, yeah. So, I mean, inside RCA, it was not like anyone had to come up with the idea or sell it. It was like, well, we already designed things So the different printed circuit boards, things are on separate printed circuit boards that we're planning on putting on a chip so that when we do, we can just swap out the printed circuit board. Yeah. So why wouldn't we, well, we're probably going to do the same thing if you're swapping up the memory.

Yeah. So it worked out great in terms of that technology. I mean, they did location tests to these things. Those did not work out great. I think you visited one of them, you've mentioned. Oh, we took a field trip. That found out where one of them was. And he said, well, you know, I want to see it.

And it was at a little shopping mall and up in Feasterville and at an arcade called The Cave. And I have Tom's hardware to thank for that because they had a discussion group, discussion thing about things that you miss around the area. And somehow, and Tom's hardware had a thing with, and it devolved into like stores and things. And it got back to tech. And it was like, oh, yeah, I remember the arcade, the cave arcade at the Feasterville Mall. And I'm going, it must have been that one because there's only one, and it wasn't like a big mall. It was like a strip shopping center with an aisle and another ship shopping center across the way, all under one roof.

One of those kinds of all. Yeah, it wasn't any bigger than that. And on one end of it was an arcade. So I'm thinking, we went to Feisterville because I'm the one reading the map saying, okay, make sure we get off the right exits from New Jersey up north of Philadelphia and Philadelphia and find the right town. So I know it was Feasterville we were looking for. and we took a field trip, and we parked, of course, at the wrong end of the mall, so we had to walk all the way down on the Sunday

for hardly anybody there, and we walked down, and we see it, and there's hardly anybody in a place, and I don't know if it was plugged in or not, because my mother said, so you want to play a few games? He said, okay, I saw it, we can go.

Mom said, wait, are you going to play a few games? He says, I played the games on the demo system. I can play it at RCA on the box with the coin box disconnected, why am I going to put a couple quarters in no machine to play the game just because it's out? I just want to see it and, you know, my product is out in the public. I'm honestly, well, we came all the, he said, yeah, but I can, you know, I could get down the deference and play the machines where they bring it out when they're testing them. I have seen a photo from that test, and it was on in that photo, but I have read that another.

other time they checked and it was powered off. And the guy's like, I don't know how to handle it. It looked scary. Well, have you heard the stories I have heard about that? I have heard that. They were turned off because the people who control access to the business were afraid that if RCA is doing it, they would have no access to distribution. And therefore, they were not enthusiastic about them becoming very popular.

Read between the lines there. The coin-up was not... But again, RCA was not pushing it because the point to have him out there was to have people who might be designing arcade games because, wow, that looks like a great way for a electronics technician to make a fast buck. Let's build on a to see that they could be an 1902 base.

So it was like, no great loss if you didn't have one. But of course, you know, because it didn't work out, they reconsidered like, all right, well, we can use the same technology for a home version. I know. Oh, yes. No, just like the microtutor, is the elf is the VIP.

Yeah. It's just a matter of when it's cost effective. It was simultaneous development after the Fred of the Fredtronic and the video mate, the original suggested name

for the Studio 2. A better name than the Studio 2. Because if you look at them, they're both the same. Yeah. There are Fred with the input for two control panels

rather than one. And they're both identical. And my mother, my father, made emphasis that he's having a hard time reminding everyone involved in breaking the arcade game, that it's different. You can change the guts of it cheaply. The whole advantage is the arcade owner doesn't have to pay for a new box, a new cabinet and TV. He uses the old one. He just pays for a new ROM card. He says, because they keep suggesting box art for the games.

He said, and I told him, you make generic artwork on the cabinet and you've had these plastic slides that you can put the instructions and the artwork on the box in these places the mount, the additional plaques and the instructions thing, and you make

the control panel generic for as many times of games as you can. And if you don't use some of the controls for some of the games, it's okay. Yeah. Okay? But they keep putting showing me suggested artwork that goes with this game for that way for the cabinet

you're defeating the whole purpose at the repaint the cabinet he said so right there he says I see this is doom they don't get it yeah but very forward thinking very much like kind of what the it's like you know in the 70s

when everything was TTL like yeah you would have to replace the whole machine there were very few games that you could just like swap the board out I think really only Exidy made But actually, you know, you can't blame the people who have that mindset. Yeah. Okay. Because when you're talking about early days of dedicated game players, the circuitry costs more than the box.

Mm-hmm. So there is no reason to put all the expense in the custom printed circuit boards for a game if you're not going to have a box that advertises the game and some bland generic box. Because the box is the least expensive component of the entire video game console. Yeah, there's definitely a factor of like, okay, how do we actually attract people to like try this out? And they're coming from an era where, and the pinball machine, the pinball machine itself is a lot less expensive than the pinball guts of it. So what do you care that you're not using as an advertising platform to the best? It's not like it's a valuable thing you want to reuse on the next pinball machine, you know? Right. You're not...

Next design. We'd like to reuse some of that artwork and some of the panels from the box. The box was the lowest cost part of designing a new pinball machine. Yeah, you're not getting Spirit of 762 or something. Yeah, you don't have to say, well, we'll just repaint part of the artwork on the side and we'll use it for the new artwork. I'll save you anything. Yeah, based on the memos, you have like the Fred three, which is the... consoleized version and then you've got the video mate after that following

slash studio two. These ones use the 1802. They're a little more compressed, I guess, form factor-wise. You wrote a couple games on there as well. Again, we go back to the VIP

comes out just before the studio two. And so that wants games. They need an example programs in it. R.C. doesn't want games because it's not professional because it was pitched as a self-study course for engineers to get an embedded microprocessor design. And RCE doesn't, while they bought into that idea,

they're going to go full till, while putting games in it would cheap in it and make it look like it wasn't a professional quality, self-study course for engineers, and would cut into our sales, corporate sales, for the training program. And my father had pitched it all as, you might as well make it for self-study affordable

for people to buy on their own. if the company doesn't buy the training program, but it's still the materials you could use in the corporate training program. So they're a focus on. It's a corporate training program thing, and an additional will make it available to the public. Well, you have games in it. We're going to reduce our credibility as a professional study course

that they'll pay for it to have training in companies. That does. Darn! They really are focuses on that, and I really can't now say, well, but you'll miss the hobbyist market. So he had to say, look, every demo we've ever done in-house has involved games. And it went fine.

He says, here's the argument. He says, and I'm going to have to be sexist. Sorry, Mom and you girls, but they bought it. It was like when the engineer wants to do it and his company won't buy him the training kit, it's cheap enough he can afford to buy his own. And when his wife says, well, if it's that important, why doesn't your company pay for it, why you have to pay for it? He can say, well, if I own it, after I'm none learning, it plays games and the kids will have

something they can play games on, so it won't be a waste of money. And they bought that. That's how they got into video games. So that's how the game's got in the VIP manual. And because I worked one of them, a couple of them that got in, when the studio team came out, and RCA management said, okay, we need to say we have a game in these categories. and dad said, got out of the meeting when they signed the categories, people said, I'll do that, I'll do that.

He said, no one volunteered to do the quiz for Random House. And he said, and I'm thinking what he does? Okay, quiz game. The 140, you present the 147th question, you match it to the 147th answer. If they match, you add one to the score. If they don't, you go on to the 148th question. I can see why no one's volunteering to do that one.

Exactly, you're not going to go, oh, cool, you did the quiz grade. Easy, easy math. Right. This really just looks like a tedious programming job that no one's going to volunteer for. And he said, so no one wanted to do it. And the other thing was, he said, we need a card game. And no one stepped up and said, okay, I'll do a card game.

So I said, you know, my daughter got a couple games in the P manual, so you know she can do them. Maybe you like me to see if she could do the quiz game. But next year she's going to college. This is telling me I'll have to pay her, not just credit. And they said, okay. And he said, minimum wage, $250 an hour. And they said, okay, maximum of 100 hours. And they have to approve it. If they do it on spec. If they like it, they'll pay for it. If not, I'll do it over again. And I said, okay, that's good. He said, and by the way, if she had ideas for other games, would you look at them? And he said, yep, same deal, same price on spec. So I told me that. He says, so they really want the quiz game done. So I suggest you do that for,

first and send it to them, because I don't think they'll look at anything else until that's done. And since they're looking for a car game, you might want to consider doing the car game next where you pitch anything else because they are already looking for it. And I said, yep, sounds good. And then I sat down to design a car game on the limited graphics that it had. And I realized why no one else had a great idea and was enthusiastic about doing a car race game. You know, you got like your top-down racetrack and you've got the little

squares racing around. On 32 by 64. Yeah. You know, and that's the kicker. You know, it's like my father said, you have to sit down and think of the display before you commit to doing a game. There is no point in doing a chessboard

when you don't have enough room for even eight by eight, let alone the size sprites you need, to distinguish the different pieces on the chessboard. And then two different colors, you only have two colors. So how are you going to do the white pieces and the black pieces? They're going to have some different shape or something on them, which means the sprites are even bigger.

And you need eight rows by eight columns of them. So you really should look at display capabilities before you say, oh, I want to write a chess program. And it would surprise you how often people don't, because it's pretty high-res, and they just assume there's plenty of space, but they don't look into it. Whoops.

Yeah, I feel like that would have been easier when they started working on the Studio 3, the backwards compatible version of the Studio 2 that had color. Okay, again, just like it's the Bicrotutor Elf VIP is like one's, and the Arcadigian Studio 2 or one design with different variations. Studio 2, 3, and 4, and 5, are pitched at the same time

as one thing of that. We add features then we actually produce it when it's cost effective. But we can design it in advance. And again, the convincing to do is advertising for them of the kinds of products you can do. He said,

we can reduce the cost by spreading the cost of tooling for the case across all of them and they'll all use the same case. Perfect. Now, I'm not sure how that weren't worked out for the Studio 5 home computer with floppy disk drives

at a keyboard. But again, by that time, if they're selling well in RCA is still in the business, they might spring for a new case. That's future management problem. Right. Right now, the sell the concept, it was you spread the development costs over many products and that'll help keep the development costs low. See, what I had heard from some of the other folks

who worked at RCA is that like the Studio 3, the need for color, really came out of seeing the Channel F at the summer consumer electronic show in 76. The need for color came from getting my father to agree that they should wait until color was cheap enough to do. And he said it's hard enough persuading RCA to do. You have to constantly be trying to convince them.

And the moment they say yes, you can't say, oh, thanks, there'll be three years before it's cost effective to do what I just proposed. You have to say, okay, we're ready to go until before they change their mind, which means right now, black and white is affordable, we go black and white

and on the joysticks. Okay, if you read the articles by the guy who designed the joysticks for Fairchild, and how long it took him and how many technical problems the out of how.

You understand when my father said, it's RCA. They're going to take a long time to develop keypads that are like telephone keypads that are reliable and rugged and things. Because the guys they assign it to are not going to have any sense of urgency

about making a Christmas season. You know, you're going to be selling keypads forever. No, you're not. And he said, and if he told them, solve the practical problems of a cheap, rugged, well, fine caliber,

you know, calibration joystick, it will take them 10 years to design it. Yeah. So, you might as well as well as well, you might as well as well, you might as well, and then just buy it from them. So right now, you get out what RCA can get out now,

which is black and white with a keyboard. He said, and look, Pong is selling a lot. There are lots of games you can do that are Pong-like. And you're only waiting for the cost to come now and the color before this is obsolete, and the color one comes out. So just get it out there while you can. So, you know, people say your father was against color. Well, he was against color as being necessary before you ship.

He said, you can do black and white screens for business computers. And IBM agreed there was no color on the IMPC. There's text in one color. Right. Okay. So, yeah, I mean, there's plenty of uses and it's expensive to do color. Let's not wait to start selling the system. We'll sell another system when we add color.

And, you know, RCA didn't sell this other system, but like an outfit in Hong Kong, a Connick, which apparently was, was the largest electronics company in Hong Kong at the time. They licensed the Studio 3 and like all of these games to sell like in different parts of the world, which they did. And it was kind of prolific at the time. And I guess like the idea of like licensing out the 1802 technology did kind of work out for RCA in that instance. Well, no. I see again, everything was licensing. If their research didn't work out, anything you had breakthroughs along way that weren't practical of that project, you could license to somebody else.

Yeah. Okay. So it was licensing was a revenue source at our, it was legitimate. It wasn't like an afterthought. It was factored in to any basic research project, which is why they did so much basic research. Right. Because they knew that they can monetize parts of it, just not how much.

So it wasn't, whatever it costs to do pure research, it wasn't going to cost that much because of the offsetting. So, again, that pitches the whole line of products. They're designing the color one, wild. they're designing the black and white one. They're finalizing exactly what the printed circuit board should be while they're still producing the studio two. RCA canceled the product.

Studio four is still just in the paper and pencil thing. And RCA management says, well, we got a product ready to go. Anyone want to license a product ready to go? Here we go. Right. And they find Connick. And Connick says, sounds good to me. You just drop this and we have the manufacturer.

Yeah. Yeah. And I want to thank the community who has discovered that it is a Studio 3 and that everyone else is actually the same computer, probably under license from Connick. Yeah. Because they didn't find any documentation at RCA license at anyone else. They only licensed the Connick. And then other variations show up all around the world in other countries. So we're assuming, since we never have documentation of a scandal about cease and desist orders, that they were.

license of Connick. The one that's very strange to me is the one that came out in Japan, the Toshiba Visicom, which is very interesting because it has specific games to that platform that don't work on other Studio 2

and 3 machines. Right, but again, in Japan, their RCA had a research lab in Japan. Oh, really? So there were RCA employees in Japan. He probably had access. So I wonder if that's where those games came. So they probably had people there who already had their hands on 1802s

and all the documentation in-house for people who were doing demos and prototyping through the labs and therefore was already enthusiastic and when it became available, all they did was write their own games. You can write your own games for it and you just couldn't change the hardware on it if you're licensing it. So it doesn't surprise me. that Japan would have people who said, hey, essentially, homebrew games. Yeah, yeah. And let's start a company and let's take our homebrew Studio 2 games and sell them.

Let's run a sumo game on this machine, which recently got dumped, and I really need to check that out, because I want to know how the heck that works on that hardware. But, yeah, I feel like... So, like, I want a shout out to the community who discovered all of this. and this mystery of where they came from and what they were because it makes so much sense of what you see including as you say the Visicom, why is that the only one with different software?

Oh, Japan? You mean where R.C. had a research lab? Yeah, yeah, that would check out. Like, I've never made that connection, but, you know. And I never would have brought up, except people have said it was licensed thing. And you mentioned, oh, now that you look at it, the only one that's significantly different in software

is the one that happened, have a division of RCA? Yeah, yeah. Maybe it does make sense. Yeah. Oh, man. Wow, it's all coming together now. Well, as I say, if you don't have the community of hobbyists digging into the facts and

finding documentation and then disseminating the information, you can't connect the dots because someone else has to find more dots. Yeah. And I feel like at this point, like RCA of all companies, like their video game efforts and computer efforts are probably some of the most well documented because, like, you have all of this internal material, you've had people willing to talk about this stuff for years now, and you have a dedicated group of people in the community who are just like, okay, how does all of this, like, come together? Like, what does any of this, like, mean?

Can I just address that? Yeah. Okay. By all means. Right. It is a combination of factors, but I think I have a reason why it came together for RCA, products. Okay.

First of all, RCA made money of intellectual property, which means they documented everything going on in RCA and kept the documents because you never know

that'll be a patent dispute. They did love to litigate everything. Whether it was research or part of a product, they were licensing pieces of it, if not the whole product

to people, and they were subject to something litigating it at any time. So they made you record everything and they held onto it. So right there, that helps. So when the company went under, there was already

that to be taken over by someone who would curate it. So it's not like some smaller company that they weren't keeping the records as they went because they were busy doing the products and they didn't have a legal department. Right. So that helped. And then on the second thing is, did you ever have the sheer joy of attending a retired RCE engineers meeting? Not a meeting, but I've certainly attended. Have you hung out with groups of retired RCA engineers? They are very chatty. And they talk a lot about stories about RCA,

and they're very interested in stories about RCA. Mm-hmm. Okay? So the fact that there's a group out there when the Internet comes and you can cheaply publish your things, and there's an automatically affinity group of people who have an association either directly or through family members with RCA and have lots of stories about RCA to share is just another serendipity.

Yeah, yeah. And this always seems to me like new stuff to turn up, like the Fred 3 stuff that showed up a couple years ago. Just earlier this year, I helped dump a prototype studio 3 game called Space Explorer, Studio 2. It was out of Studio 3, like, plug-in card that got designed. But apparently Phil Balzer, one of the other folks involved with the 1802 products, had this and took it home and his family inherited it when he passed away, and they just recently sold it to a collector who wanted to get it dumped. And it does, was it like nicer graphics?

I mean, it was a black and white. No, I mean, but the style. It looks like someone cared more about the graphics. I say that because there's a patent that the only patent of dads that has a co-author on it is one with Phil Balser and it has to do with graphics. You know, it's funny. Like 81-8, you knew the end of the thing. This was around 78 based on the date on the thing,

and I did talk with the author of it recently, and he was like, yeah, you know, I was just messing around. Like, they wanted games, and someone asked me if I could write one, and I put that together. I don't think it was good, but I wrote it. I think with Phil Pulsor, since he was actively involved

in developing some of the more advanced graphics chips at the end, probably the ones that went into the Studio 3. Well, this one didn't have color, implemented yet. Right, but I'm just saying because he was interested in that aspect of it. It wouldn't surprise me that he had some ideas for games and continued on when it wasn't a project

and it wasn't likely to get into an official RCA cartridge. Yeah. It was just very funny finding this. How come Connick didn't license this game? Like, what about it? Were they like, ah, pass? Or didn't they know? Or did they not know? Did it never, did no one back

in Defford at Distributive Parts and Special Services when they were told, we're discontinued to pack up all the Studio 3 and the ship of the Connick, not know they had it. Yeah, maybe. No?

Like the unicorn, it missed the boat. I think we're coming up on time. So do you have any final thoughts on this sort of legacy with early computers and early technology gaming? Well, I just like, again,

shout out to the community that supports everything because thanks to your efforts and many other people, ourselves and all, to get the information out there. I no longer dread Google searching for anything on this, because 10, 20 years ago, the things I would find were like, what was RCA thinking when?

And I'd have to say, oh, God, I don't want to get involved in the flame where I'm just to ignore them. RCA wasn't thinking about any of this product line. They just wanted to sell semiconductor parts in CMOS to get licensing the CMOS technology to other chip fab places, So they wanted the biggest complicated circuit they could get on it to show, no, you can do a lot with CMOs. It's not limiting because the gates are big. Look how cool it is.

After that, it was all my father, trying to convince them to get products out there in people's hands so that they would discover that it's easy to learn using an 1802 and have fun with it. Those were the two driving forces and everything. And RCA thinking about anything on those products have nothing to do with it. Yeah. And you know what? I just find it very fascinating myself, like this whole history with RCA, like this giant of American consumer electronics, like, sort of dipping a toe into this very small pond, like, which, as you say, is basically a rounding error on their overall, like, finances.

It's one piece of mist on the battleship. Like, they're making so much money off of, like, TVs and litigation and patent fees and everything. People in RCA would call the real products, the real consumer products, records. Yeah, the stuff that funded their research lab, really. So, like, the fact that they, like, had any involvement in this space at all is just very interesting. Well, I think the visual I would like to people take away from this was RCA growing and growing, and then a seven-league boosts. They can walk over mountains as they walk.

And unfortunately, they travel far enough into the future, and they are in the land of the Lilliputians. And they have no idea what to do with all these people under their feet. But, hey, there's money we made down there, but they don't know how to get down there at that scale to make money with little startups. But they see there's a lot of little mutations who are starting companies that are making a lot of money, but still not enough money to notice. But it's sort of like, oh, but they could license our technology to do it. Hey, little effusions, why do you Seimos to do that with? And Dad's there saying, ah, in your ear, see what's like, I think I know how to. to reach them. You want me to jump down there and talk to them, but I'm not going to tell you

you we're hobbyists. I'm not going to tell you the specifics of how I'm going to tell you, I'm going to help your corporate training program down with the mildly large people, but I'm going to drop down. I'm going to spread the word among the hobbyists. I think that's the visual that best captures it. I think that's a good note to go out on. So thank you very much for joining me for this. Thank you very much for letting me get that out there. And again, to thank all the people who enjoy this hobby so much and are willing to put the extra effort in to share it. Okay. Do you have anything

you would like to shill or promote before we sign off? Well, I couldn't mention my BCF East talk this year. By all me. And you'll be able to find it on the VCF YouTube channel in the future was the Cosmic Ath Neo2

Control Logic Unit how to program with a soldering iron for people who would like to know how it's different design a programmable circuit the excuses machine and live instruction as opposed to just writing a simulator per machine language. And if anyone has any suggestions of things along those lines they'd like to see in the next year's talk, contact Kevin and he'll screen them for something that you can say in polite company and pass them along to me. Sounds good. I'll do my stuff off the recording. I can just record that at home.

Thank you very much. Thank you again to Joyce Weissbecker for joining me on that podcast recording at the Vintage Computer Festival East. This has been Kevin Bunch. You can find me on Blue Sky at Atari Archive.org, which is the name of my website, and also is my book that you can purchase now through Limited Run Games. It's Atari Archive Volume 1, 1977, 78. I do talk about the studio too, a fair bit in there as well. And you've been listening to Retronauts.

This is a Patreon-supported episode. This is a Patreon-supported show. You can subscribe to us at patreon.com slash retronauts if you haven't already. At the $3 level, you get each episode a week early and at a higher bit rate. And at the $5 level, you get access to Friday bonus episodes, Diamond Fight's weekly columns, as well as the Retronauts Discord server, which is full of, great and fun conversations and people. So join us, won't you? And with that, thank you for listening.