The Weird Processor: Olivetti's PC Typewriter

well this will be a weird one usually when I make a video I have some kind of specific story that I want to tell whenever I look at old technology I begin by asking the question what was its relevance at the time what was its context what made it interesting at one time and then not later and with a lot of products I have to ask the even bigger question was it ever interesting and I do a bunch of research to find out the answers to this questions as best I can and I hope I get it more right than wrong but I'm no different than any other nerd really so there's plenty of stuff that I like just because I do not because it has a fascinating history I mean some things just don't have any real Mysteries to discover you look at them and you say I see what that does and I see why nobody makes it anymore and I've never really sure how to present those things word processors were once a significant Market category um they haven't been for a very long time and for very good reasons I own seven of them for some reason I bought them over the course of the last year or so and I don't really know why every time I bought one it was very much a uh I just think their neat moment uh but they've sat on my shelf for close to a year I've powered each one up I've used it several times and I've come up with nothing to say about any of them they're completely self-explanatory and I want to get to the good parts of this video so I'm just going to give you a whirlwind tour of this collection such as it is fundamentally word processors are an elaboration on electronic typewriters which are in themselves an elaboration on the electric typewriter this is one of those and it's exactly what it sounds like it's a typewriter with electric assistance you don't have to press the keys as hard as a conventional typewriter so it's faster and it takes less effort but it's still just a typewriter if you make a mistake you're stuck with it the ability to correct mistakes is mostly what defines electronic typewriters uh this guy here for instance is a really low-end one I think these were common in like the late ' 80s and '90s and it's got a little LCD screen here when you type on this thing instead of printing every letter immediately they all appear on the little screen if you fill up a line or you press return it prints everything you've entered but up until that point you can go back erase what you've typed or make edits on that little screen and then print it only when you're ready so these aren't a replacement for Microsoft Word by any means but I imagine they were a godsend for people who made one or two typos in a given line but were otherwise decent typists this guy here is another machine in the same category just more expensive uh it's still a typewriter with an LCD but it's a better one it's clearer it's back lit and it's wide enough to span a full page of text albeit only 16 lines at a time this one acts a lot more like a computer it has a 50,000 character memory so you can write several pages of text before you have to print anything at all or you can just never print anything uh because this has a floppy drive here on the side so you can save your documents and you can even exchange files with a PC and this leads us to a very important observation these are all computers there're 's a CPU in there and there's RAM and there's a ROM chip with a program that it runs these have all the same basic parts as an Apple 2 or even an IBM PC I wouldn't be surprised if most of them were more sophisticated than an entire zedx Spectrum in fact since they're mostly considerably newer and all word processors in fact came out after the home computer Revolution began so you could always have just bought a PC instead and I'll talk briefly later about why someone might not have wanted to do that but first uh far enough in to make another important observation you may have noticed yourself already these are boring I mean hogus even prints anything anymore let alone Texton documents with fixed width nonproportional fonts because that's all you can do with these they all use Daisy wheel impact printer mechanisms so there's an ink ribbon and a plastic wheel with different letter forms and then a hammer strikes one through the other onto the page to make a letter this sort of solution made nice clean crisp text for the standards of the 1980s but there's no reason to care about them now cheap LaserJet printers can do much better than these in every conceivable way they can do different fonts and graphics and even color here if you want a different font you have to physically swap out the print wheel and if you want Graphics or proportional text or color well you just can't have those I'm sure I also don't need to tell you that the software is far clunkier than anything you've used on a PC in your life you can do some basic things like copy and paste but it's far more tedious s and many things we take for granted are impossible such as Rich Text thanks to the daisy wheel printer it just can't do italics or anything like that and the list of what these can't do is longer than what they can so if you think this all looks dull as dishwater you're right I think they are too I picked all these machines up opportunistically and only later acknowledged that they had nothing noteworthy going on inside what actually piqued my interest in word processors in the first place many years ago was seeing machines like this one this is a brother WP 75 and it was made in the mid 80s which means that it predates decent LCD technology so it uses a CRT not only that but a weird custom wide aspect ratio CRT it's not like masked or anything you can see it really is that wide you're not going to find something like this in pretty much anything else maybe like some old EKG machine so that's cool right it is incredibly bright it has Amber phosphors that are very easy on the eyes and in every other way it is no more interesting than these other machines the beautiful striking Amber readout on the first one I ever saw 20 25 years ago made it Lodge in my mind's craw but once I actually got one I found out that besides the display technology it is exactly as dull as all the others and at first it looks like it has lots of features the keycaps all have these uh labels on them with extra features it can do but you realize very quickly that these are mostly replacements for physical controls on on a typewriter uh where they aren't just simple digital Necessities a bunch of them are related to margin adjustments for instance and a bunch more are just shortcuts for file operations there is nothing remarkable here and this is how it is when you're the kind of nerd that many of us are you look at something and you go wow I want to be near that I want to be in in some way involved with that but there there's no reason to do so it confers no benefit it does nothing intrinsically special and nonetheless I bought several more of these after this one this is a brother WP 3410 uh it is a very cheap device and I care so little about it that I haven't even bothered keeping it in one piece it was too much of a pain in the ass to put back together uh now this thing at first looks like a very cheap electronic typewriter uh you'll notice that there's no screen on it there are some of these that have the whole computer deal the CPU and the RAM and the whatnot but no screen because they have no correction mechanism so they lack a lot of the sophistication of the higher end word processors and this can actually behave like that if you want whoops uh well I screwed that up but you get the gist so this can be a very very simple device but it's actually supposed to be quite a bit more because if we take a look at the side here this has a 9pin plug which is actually for a monitor this is the monitor that brother sold with this thing and uh you've actually seen it before I'll tell you where in a moment if we plug this into the machine there we go we get a picture that very much resembles the one from the wp 75 because this actually runs basically the same software as that thing it's just several years newer and as you can see it's also not in the same weird Ultra wide aspect ratio this one's much more ordinary and that's probably because this is actually just a normal PC monitor we can plug this into an IBM PC with an MDA or Hercules graphics card and it'll work perfectly I actually did that back in my video on the Head Start Explorer that's where you might have seen this before now that's not to say that this machine is PC based but it does have some similar components here's a picture of the motherboard we can see that it's built around a Hitachi version of a z80 processor so it's clearly not remotely x86 based but over here is an HD 6445 CRT controller that's a sort of like what we'd Now call a GPU and it's a close relative of the MC 6845 controller used in the PC brother pretty much cloned the PC's Graphics Hardware in something not remotely PC related probably because MDA monitors were already being manufactured for use with PCS so it was cheap to Rebrand them now most of these are from the mid to late 80s so they've got that very strong 80s energy with the Amber screens and the squared off beige plastic a effect and whatnot but they continued being made well into the '90s so The Styling did eventually start to change this guy the Smith Corona pwp 88d looks uh a fair bit newer in its styling at least I think it might still be from the very late 80s but at any rate uh it does have a more modern looking white f for screen and while that doesn't suck intrinsically the way they implemented it does did you know that back in these days word processors even on PCS almost all used black backgrounds by default whether you had an Amber a green or even a white CRT that was only the color of the text the rest of the screen was usually black so you weren't blasting yourself with intense glaring light for hours and hours while you were writing in other words dark mode is not a recent invention white text on black was the default for decad ades starting with the first electronic Terminals and ending only in the gooey era when what you see is what you get editors began actually showing you what the finished page would look like which demanded the now standard black text on white background color scheme well that was totally pointless on a dedicated word processor without any advanced page layout features but Smith Corona apparently decided they still wanted to look ahead of the curve sure enough this thing is incredibly unpleasant to look at partly because it's blinding white and part L for a reason I'll address near the end of this video but in every other way this is no different than the other machines I've shown you I'm not even bothering to show you more than a glimpse of the interface because it'll put you to sleep like melatonin the features are all very basic all these things are pretty much the same they all have floppy drives um all of them can read PC discs although for some reason the brother machines I showed you earlier use a format that stores only 240 kilobytes and can't be read by anything else I can't explain that the Sony 3 and 1/2 in floppy has never sucked that much even the incredibly early Mac floppies from 1984 stored 400k so how brother screwed this up is anyone's guess but nobody else had that problem uh all these machines have spell check features uh which was actually not a universal thing on PCS you often had to buy a separate spell check package but I imagine almost everyone did so this is probably moot uh also since these are computers a few of them include other apps uh particularly spread sheet programs but those are also nothing to write home about uh here's one of them on the Smith Corona it's just a basic visaal clone that's only remarkable because it's glued to a printer in theory the brother WP 3410 would have a spreadsheet app as well but apparently you had to load that from an included disc which nobody has anymore this I guess could be an interesting feature uh it's not surprising that a computer can run programs off a disc wow but it does mean that if you were really really really bored you could probably write your own custom software for one of these but I don't recommend you spend your one life that way let me get real with you for a moment I'm generally very much against the practice of gutting old computers and replacing the insides with a Raspberry Pi or whatever that's a great way to take something potentially interesting and turn it into something that's exactly the same as a $200 Walmart laptop and will shortly thereafter go in a drawer or a closet and never get turned on again but in this one case I'm going to insist that you do that with these things because it's the only reasonable thing you could do to keep them from becoming landfill fodder here's why despite being dedicated typing devices actually typing on one of these sucks it's just not very good by modern standards by the standards of the mid 80s I'm sure they were just fine probably much more pleasant than a typewriter but if you have fantasies about using one of these as a distraction free writing machine honestly just don't waste your time the keyboards for one thing are crap the only keyboards you could get in the80s that were good by modern standards were on the IBM PC and some of its clones everything else falls off in quality fast and these are no exception I'm sure they use foam and foil or rubber mats inside the keycaps are lightweight and shaky they Jam easily and they are incredibly unpleasant to type on at high speed not that you could do that anyway since the software is also very slow I regularly dunk on Old keyboards and computers for not being able to keep up with my typing I understand that this is not fair I understand that far fewer people could type at 180 words per minute in the 80s and not that many people can do so even now but here's the thing I don't know why any computer in existence shouldn't be able to handle it anyway and these for some reason can't every single keystroke on one of these machines carries something like a quarter second delay before it appears on the screen it's always lagging behind your typing no matter how slow you are and while these all have keystroke buffers if I type anywhere close to my Max Speed they all start dropping keystrokes some only when wrapping at the end of a line some midw but they all do it and even if you don't type that fast it's still just unpleasant seeing your words appear with such extreme lag I don't know how fast the processors in these things are but even if they were measured in kertz the job they're doing is just so simple process keyboard input store the character in memory that should be it to be fair though maybe these don't do video output the way the PC did on an old school PC graphics card the text is rendered by the card itself with zero CPU impact except when it's updating the screen maybe these don't work that way and the CPU is responsible for rendering the contents of memory into a bit map to feed the screen maybe there's no video memory and the CPU has to race the beam to keep the display updated if that's the case then maybe it makes sense that these are so slow adding the hardware to allow the video output to be rendered independently the CPU might have made them as expensive as a PC halfway de feating the purpose but whatever the reason I still feel that they're really not very fun to type on in 2023 if I somehow haven't made my point yet it's this these machines resist any effort to love them other than the basic aesthetic which does vibe very hard indeed they're just old and crappy and pointless and they sort of were when they were new you might have assumed that since these are dedicated single purpose devices they'd have a leg up on just a program running on a contemporary PC but this isn't true the PC even in 1981 years before any of these were sold was a vastly superior word processing platform if you wanted to write letters an essay or a book a PC was better than any hardware word processor I've tried assuming of course that you could afford it had the space for it and understood how to use it IBM PCS were originally thousands of dollars and that was in 1980s money so we're talking about a fortune here and this remained closer to True than not for pretty much the rest of the decade a Circ in 1987 for instance kiplinger's personal finance said that you might want to just buy a PC instead of a word processor since they were now coming down in price to less than $1,500 ouch a Tandy 1000 SX a kind of mid-range low-end machine was still about a grand and that was for just the PC the Monitor and the keyboard a printer was extra so was the word processor software meanwhile a Magnavox video writer uh very similar to my brother wp7 only cost $600 it was also a complete integrated unit with the display floppy Drive keyboard printer and software Allin one box that's a huge difference in both cost and convenience especially since you didn't need to learn how to use a whole general purpose computer just to write a few letters and on that point a lot of people probably were not into computers they were only looking for a replace for their existing typewriter and I need to harp on this part of why it's so unfair of me to dunk on these things for not handling my machine gun typing rate is that typing used to just be different before PCS became Universal I don't have firsthand experience of this but as I understand it fast typing on a typewriter was a very different technique than what we do now and if you transferred it to an electronic keyboard then you basically got a huge Improvement in speed and comfort without otherwise changing anything very probably a lot of buyers only wanted to move forward from a typewriter at all because they recognized that they were relics from the 19th century that didn't mean they were ready to jump into the deep end of the 20th so all these reasons may have Justified the existence of these word processors but the fact remains that as far as I can tell if you were a nerd these were just never state-of-the-art they were never the best way to write text they were just crappy single-purpose computers that didn't even do their one job very well so I just spent uh 10 15 minutes telling you how boring these things are so is there anything here you want to see well probably the fact is that there are interesting word processors out there there aren't many but they do exist however many of them aren't from the US Japan and several other Asian countries have a long history of dedicated word processors with extremely wide- ranging and interesting feature sets I even have one this is the Panasonic U1 Pro 607 it is absolutely fascinating and I don't read or speak Japanese this thing is wild uh I have no idea when it's from but it seems like it should just be a PC I mean it's so sophisticated it's designed like a laptop it's got this huge back lit bitmap screen and right from the jump it seems to offer a whole array of programs but I can't get most of this to make sense through machine translation so I'm totally lost I can say there are at least Japanese and English typing modes and then it looks like there might be a a spread sheet on here uh graphics features maybe a terminal mode maybe this thing has games I have no idea um it seems to have pretty Advanced Hardware features too um if we take a look at the sides here we've got a cartridge Port there and then around on the other side uh we not only have the floppy drive we also have some sort of external interface here some sort of weird duub there and uh even a a PCM CIA slot here for a ROM card this thing seems massively overbuilt for an electronic typewriter and it still has severe input lag that can't keep up with my typing so I'd love to tell you what this thing is all about but I'm just totally clueless and definitely the wrong person for the job it does however at least make it clear that there are greater Dimensions to the world of word processors and yet it wasn't until a few days ago that a fellow gatherer of strange things finally dropped a machine on me that gave me something I could talk about although I'm glad he didn't literally drop it on me because I don't think I would have survived this is the alletti ETV 2700 and besides anything else about it it is the biggest godamn typewriter I've ever touched the uh the platin the part that holds the paper in place is 17 in wide I can only imagine this is for like putting a a tabloid or A2 sheet in there sideways I don't know why you do that but I guess people must cuz there it is now I've always had a kind of a soft spot for all of Eddie uh they're an Italian company that originally just made typewriters some incredibly unbelievably stylish typewriters in fact uh and later on they made many other stylish things including eventually computers as far as I know their PCS were mostly ordinary other than having incredibly aesthetically pleasing vents uh the olivetti M24 was resold under both the Xerox and AT&T Brands which makes it kind of historically interesting but I don't think there was anything that remarkable about the machine itself it makes sense though that this company makers of both typewriters and computers would make a computerized typewriter which is of course what this is if the uh dual floppy drives on the left weren't a giveaway but well for all this thing immense bulk you may notice that it has no built-in display like the little brother machine from earlier this requires a separate monitor to operate but unlike the brother it really can't be used at all without one and that'll put you in a pickle if you ever come across one of these and I decided to start this video by illustrating this particular problem instead of explaining anything about how the machine works because I want you to get an idea of just how alien this thing is to get to the video output we have to take this rear cover off and the video output is this RCA plug over here and it's actually got a DC plug next to it if we pull these cables out this one here is just a a plain old RCA cable that's for the video and then it's got a double-ended DC Barrel jack cable so you plug that in there it supplies 12 volts and I guess uh that the monitor they supplied with this thing when you bought it ran off of DC which is an interesting way to do it I've never actually seen a a home computer of any kind that used DC to run the monitor uh but I don't have that monitor so I had to wing it what exactly comes out of this RCA cable well since this came out in 1988 and it's a single RCA output you'd probably figure that it's ordinary composite video that was common with home computers and even PCS at the time uh the IBM PC convertible for instance had a plug much like this for connecting its beautiful 9-in green phosphor CRT and despite the low resolution of CGA text mode that gave a very crisp and readable display uh IBM also drove the internal display in their PC portable via an internal composite interface as did other luggable PC vendors so this was a well-respected technique and it seems very reasonable here so let's give that a shot here's the monitor from the PC convertible let me just power this up and we'll plug the cable in here all right Moment of Truth uh well that's not it something's there but it's obviously not very happy with it it's probably won't cause any damage but I'm going to turn it off just to be safe now this monitor takes ordinary composite video at ntsc frequency which I demonstrated in an earlier video by feeding it a camera image that worked fine it also looked really good so clearly the all of edti is not outputting in TSC compliant video it took me hours to figure out what is coming out of this thing my first guess at why this didn't work and probably yours as well was that this might be outputting a pal signal that's a a good guess if I do say so myself it fits the evidence ol of edti is an Italian company and pal was the dominant TV standard at the time ignoring the issue of color encoding pal and ntsc are not that dissimilar other than their frequency so you may very well indeed get a distorted picture if you feed pal into an old unintelligent ntsc display that makes sense now conversely uh you might think that doesn't make sense because this machine although it came from Italy was modified for sale in the US if we look at the sticker on the bottom it says 110 volt 60 HZ most devices converted like that are also converted to ntsc but consider this they sold a monitor with the machine why bother changing the video standard uh you might think it's because the line frequency is different here but the reality is that almost no CRT in history ever timed itself off of wall current they all had internal oscillators and pal displays will work just fine on 60 HZ so alletti absolutely could have shipped pal displays even in the US as long as they told buyers that they were only for use with the ETV so this is a plausible Theory it's also completely [Applause] incorrect I own a whole variety of multiformat monitors you know pvms stuff like that so generally speaking I don't care of stuff as power ntsc so let's just go ahead and plug this guy in h well that's not sinking and I know this can do ntsc and pal so that's not it either I tried a couple other pvms I tried some LCD broadcast monitors I even tried a much newer Dell PC monitor with a composite input Just for kicks but everything produced either different kinds of trashed images or no image at all so this is definitely not pal now I thought maybe one of my capture cards would work so I tried that no luck but someone recently loaned me one of these modded GBS arcade video converters and I thought that might do some good so I tried it and I got a bit bit of a lead I have to say I find this thing very finicky even when I feed it clean VGA signals it seems to just randomly lose sync or misinterpret the resolution so in 20 minutes of experimentation I only got it to sync to the olivetti a couple of times it then only produced a fraction of the display so in general it failed me but when it was supposedly in sync I noticed that the screen claimed it was getting a 70hz signal assuming this is true it explains our problem no standard television monitor is ever going to s to a 70 HZ picture that's why nothing I tried worked but it doesn't leave a lot of options what can sync to that well if you're ever in this situation yourself the answer is an awful lot of VGA monitors VGA text mode ran at 70 HZ so all VGA monitors have to support it and a decent number also support sync on green a technique where a TV style composite sync pulse is merged into the green component of the VGA signal now I don't have a monitor handy that supports this but I do have an exron VGA to HDMI scaler with incredibly wide signal tolerances sure enough when I connected the all of Ed's video output to the green pin of a VGA breakout cable just like that I got a picture and here's what that picture revealed it's a post diagnostic which tells us the most interesting thing about this machine right up front it has an NEC v40 CPU this is exciting because the v40 is an x86 processor and see by the way was a huge manufacturer of xa6 compatible CPUs in the 1980s starting with their v20 which got used in tons of PC clones and sold as a dropin upgrade for normal PCS uh they also produced the v30 an upgraded version of the same thing and then they made the v40 which is sort of a different thing some Googling suggests that it's kind of like Intel's 80186 basically it's an upgraded 8086 but with some built-in peripherals like a dma controller and interrupt timer that make it more convenient for embedded applications we'll explore this a little bit more later on in the video there were a few PC like devices sold with 80186 CPUs uh like the deck rainbow 100 for instance but they were generally not fully PC compatible they required custom versions of Doss and they wouldn't run a lot of PC software this has neither of those problems though I'll demonstrate this more later but I can tell you UPF front that I've booted ordinary MS DOS 6.2 on here with no trouble and in fact it shipped with MS DOS 3.2 I have the original boot dis here and if we put this in we start booting and this takes a really surprisingly long time it's about 45 seconds from startup to launching the software but at last here we are this is the word processor package uh which ol of Eddie gave the cryptic name s WP although there's some dispute on that Wikipedia has an enormous block of text completely unsighted that says that this was originally called SWS and that that was short for secretary's workstation that seems reasonable it goes on to mention the term s swp in several other places so it seems like ol ofed renamed it fair I have no reason to dispute that but James mang does he's some guy who commented on the discs that someone uploaded internet archive and he said this I am 100% certain that this software archive is a fraud built recently from source code there's this version in Italian and there's also an English Version kicking around why because the software was actually called SWS not swp this whole thing is a stupid British penis joke by a child sitting around with some old source code a virtual machine and a compiler the British read me even references stiffy floppies give me a break this is abusive of the historical record I'm not saying it should be taken down because the software does work and otherwise seems exactly right but the little penis joke by a British loser is not helpful at all just post the source codee please James I regret to inform you they just changed the name who could possibly think that the single letter P was somehow a dick joke I don't get it and uh stiffy floppy while hideously embarrassing at least in modern American English was genuinely a term used for 3 and 1 half inch floppies when they first came out in some places cuz you know they aren't floppy so people thought they should have a new word it didn't stick thank God but it makes sense that it was tried and you can confirm this in 5 seconds on Google if you're posting on the internet in 2022 and trying to correct someone maybe go to Google for 5 seconds and type in the thing you're mad about s swp is not a dick joke it's just the name they used I have no idea what it stands for software word processor maybe who knows who cares let's move on the copyright date confirms this is from 1988 uh but curiously the spell check checking dictionary is only copyright 1984 did they use a 4-year-old dictionary probably I've noticed this in other word processors as well the dictionary is always years out of date maybe Webster just didn't put out updated digital versions every year who knows but at any rate here we are at the main menu now since this is both old and not a conventional PC app the UI and the terminology are a bit strange some of this is probably due to rough translation but being Italian doesn't excuse all the weirdness of the UI for inance you'd expect to see new document and load document but instead there's a single combined create modify print option if we pick that it asks us to put in the name of a text S swp calls documents texts it's an Albany expression uh now if we want to load a file we have to type out the name I mean we don't pick the file there's no browse files option you have to have memorized the name of the files on your disk and gotten the right file name beforehand so if we don't type the exact name of of an existing file it just assumes that we want to make a new one if you don't know what file you want when it asks you're just stuck unless you know that the exit key tucked down here in the corner of the keyboard and nearly invisible will cancel this prompt of course even that is smoother than what happens if you do create an empty file you just get stuck here in the text editor because the exit button does nothing here for some reason so you'll be unable to leave until you figure out that the command for leaving is controll q very intuitive if my theory about these being angled towards computer unfamiliar consumers is accurate then you'd expect the software to avoid leaving users in the lurch like this you would expect them to do better than the average PC software package at the same time at leading you into the correct next action but even word star from 1983 showed you what files were on your hard drive in the load dialogue so alletti failed to achieve the ease of use of a then 5-year-old PC app this stings unfortunately the standard PC word processor of the era Word Perfect had this exact same problem a lot of computer stuff just sucked in surprising ways in the 1980s because you were simply expected to devour and memorize the entire manual before you so much as launched the app this definitely suffers from that problem probably more importantly than any of that however this was not the first all of edti ETV it was actually the eth or 10th model the first one the ETV 300 came out all the way back in 1982 when the software industry was far less mature and I'd guess that this machine is intended to work very much like that one did so that anyone upgrading wouldn't have to relearn how to use it that meant they had to retain design philosophies from the Stone Age you can at least go back to the menu and ask it to display list of texts to see the files on your Des oh wow it actually asked me the drive name this time every single time I've done this before it would only look at the a drive I could never figure out how to point it to the B drive it never asked me this man whatever so here's our list of files on the disc but we still can't just select something uh we have to take the name that we see here and like write it down on a piece of paper and take it back to the other screen and type it in manually or what we can do is we can go back select this again and then there's an option to print the list so let's get some paper now one strange thing about this machine that's not true for any other word processor I have is there's no knob normally with typewriters and word processors there's a big knob on the side you can use uh to advance the paper up and down and there's usually also some way to do it electronically but I haven't been able to find any good method for this so uh I'll show you more of this later but there's an interface here for manually typing text directly to the typewriter and I have to go there and then just hit Line Feed over and over it's the only way I figured out to get the paper into the machine I have to assume I'm missing something but anyway let's tell it to print this list so there's the printer for you uh it's fairly quick it's fairly quiet uh this uses a a thing called a uh I think it's a carbon Ribbon or a transfer ribbon something like that it's the same sort that's used in the IBM selectric for instance it doesn't use ink it uh just sort of mashes some like plastic or carbon onto the paper in short it just means that any cartridge you find for a machine like this will definitely still work no matter how old it is uh and of course being a daisy wheel the quality is pretty damn good no real complaints there it's just like every other Daisy wheel from the era if we look at this listing though you'll notice that all the files are listed as a name a size and a comment uh you can give your documents this little description of what they contain which is important because this uses a standard fat file system so it's limited to eight character file names using fat was crucial though because it let you copy files to and from a PC uh the native otx format that this saves is gibberish in a standard PC editor but this can open PC text files so I imagine all ofed provided a converter tool for going the other way now this video is not about this thing as a word processor I'm not going to Deep dive the software but I want to give you an idea of what it can do it's not a masterpiece of document creation by modern standards but the editor itself does have a number of advanced features that I don't think any other word processor I've seen had I mean to be unfair it still can't keep up with my typing but other than that it does seem pretty feature Rich uh the keyboard which is enormous compared to the other word processors I have offers gobs of special keys some clearer than others many of them just beep and don't explain what I did wrong which is a very 80s experience but others are straightforward if I press the footnote button for instance uh it actually adds a footnote I can put in a as many of these as I want uh and each pops up this little sub editor so you can put in whatever text you like and then when you close this it just collapses into a single number uh and you can then open it up later and edit it if you like this is pretty dope uh there's also a header and footer feature uh which is so Advanced that I actually cannot figure out all the stuff it can do there's settings in here for like defining columns and numbering the pages and all sorts of stuff it's bewildering uh there's also an outline feature that I can't begin to figure out uh and there's a table feature I can't begin to figure out it puts in this big mass of pounds and dots and I have no idea what that does each document seems to have a 65,000 character limit uh which for reference is just barely long enough to contain the script for this enormous video so it makes sense that they included a full text search feature there it is you can not only search for text but it actually has a dedicated find next button which I don't think I've seen on anything before another neat thing is this notepad button in the lower left if you hit this it pops up another little window and it asks you for a file name this is sort of a a micro sub editor this is just for quick notes so it saves to its own file format that won't overwrite any proper document you're working on with the same name there's not a lot of multitasking in this era of computing so usually when you see little glimpses of it it'll be little custom features like this and and this is a pretty clever one if you ask me there's also an option down here called insert text uh you press that you can put in the name of another document and it'll just paste the entire thing into your current project in its entirety so you can save reusable boiler plate stuff like that and then recall it instantaneously uh there's also a cut and paste mode now very often in these days uh cut and paste were kind of awkward operations on devices like this in particular this one's not too bad you hit the button and then you scroll down to the end of the segment you want to work on and then you can choose to to cut you can choose to copy uh but you can also tell it to just take that chunk of text and save it directly into a new document which is cool or you can tell it to apply text attributes about that at first I thought that this thing had no Rich text features because generally speaking Daisy wheel printers can't produce any of those do Matrix printers sort of can but on a daisy wheel it forms the entire letter in one strike so things like italics are impossible without physically changing wheels uh it can do underlines but those were a common trick way back to the beginning of mechanical typewriters uh that's actually why the underscore character exists uh the idea is that you would type your text and then you would move the head back and then type a series of underscores and you'd get an underline well this can automate that process uh every time it prints a letter it can then skip back and underscore it automatically even cooler though this can make fake bold text by printing the same character over and over while moving the head almost imperceptibly forward every time all right these are the five text decoration modes normal underlined bold bold underlined and a thing called reverse I'm going to print these all at once here I'll hit the print button until I want one copy so this is kind of weird for the first few it works like I described uh for the Bold you can see it just sort of hits the letter several times at slightly different positions and for the underline it just goes back and hits it with the underscore afterwards just like a normal typewriter all that's not remarkable but then this inverse color here this obviously doesn't work it wastes a ton of ribbon but it doesn't actually produce an inverted character what I think is supposed to be going on is that this actually supports a correction ribbon which I don't have so I think what it's supposed to do is basically black out the entire area where the character should be and then come back lift up the correction ribbon and then strike it one time to lift off just that part of the the black ink seems incredibly wasteful it chews up tons of ribbon uh I wish I had the correction ribbon so I could prove it uh it doesn't really seem worth the amount of of media it consumes at any rate uh there's clearly a lot here and it would be great if all this was backed up by a robust online help feature but sadly those were not assumptions in the80s there is an attempt at one however there's a dedicated help key down here and pressing that usually gives you some useful pointers about what actions you can take at the moment uh for instance if a new user isn't so helpless that they don't bother to look for and press a key clearly marked help then they would be informed that the shortcut to exit the text editor is control Q that's how I figured out how to get out of it so I admit that I haven't thoroughly explored everything my other word processors can do but I'm pretty convinced that almost none of this stuff is on the table I think I might have seen a bold text button somewhere maybe that was a common trick but otherwise this thing seems Far and Away more capable than the brothers or the Smith Corona now uh I did want to address this again uh one feature that was common on these things and very much worth discussing the typewriter mode button most word processor processors no matter how sophisticated their editing interface was offered a button that reduced the device to a simple electronic typewriter everything you enter goes straight to the printer mechanism skipping the editor completely this is very convenient for things like uh filling out forms you can roll a form into the machine carefully line up the type head with a field and then just fill in that field one letter at a time before manually moving on to the next field and so on doing something like that's pretty tough uh to do accurately from the normal document editor where you enter text and then print it all at once so this is an important feature and it shows up on every word processor I like how this one works though when we hit the button it pops up this little window and this appears over whatever else you're doing it shows a bunch of status info like your current position on the page the locations of the left and right margins and printer settings like how hard the hammer hits and how many lines it advances when you hit return you can also enable the text emphasis uh underline bold Etc uh but you can also move this window up down left and right so you can type while referring to whatever's hidden behind it again with multitasking being an incredibly rare thing in these days this is a pretty neat trick I should also mention there's a couple other operating modes back on the main menu uh for instance uh as I said people use typewriters to fill out forms but if you're doing a lot of the same form then you might want to use the pre-printed forms feature a lot of word processors offered something like this I think three of mine do the idea is that you put in a blank copy of a form and then you go through a wizard process that defines the locations and the names of every field you save that as a template and then later you can fill out that template by just entering all the field values once they're all entered you roll in a blank copy of the form you hit print and the printer just zooms to each form field and fills them all in super quick I would love to demo this one but it really does require the manual it's completely inscrutable I tried and utterly failed the other mode here is merge that's a short for male merge this is for things like uh printing customer billing notices uh it allows you to write a single boilerplate document and then print that over and over just changing the values in certain Fields automatically like the name the salutation the amount owed that sort of thing likewise I tried to figure this out to demo for you but it was incomprehensible and at any rate like I said neither of those features are unique at all and I think with that you've seen pretty much everything that this machine can do and you know I'm someone who's sat down and compared seven different word processors so I'm going damn this thing's kind of sick but I imagine that you the viewer are yawning like a kid in a carpet store at this point it's a word processor that's all it is I mean this one doesn't even have a spreadsheet but that's where things get interesting this is a PC clone at its heart it doesn't just use a PC compatible processor it really is a PC and alletti actually marketed it that way it's not just that using a xa6 CPU was the cheapest way to build an electronic typewriter or at least if that was their reasoning for choosing it they didn't stop there they could have taken steps to obscure the underlying dos system but they didn't if we go back to the menu and simply pick exit the program we're thrust unceremoniously into Doss the entire software suite that I just finished showing you is just a program uh you can see s swp exe that's what we were running that's in autoexec.bat uh so it runs as soon as you boot but you could just remove that line and this thing would simply stop being a word processor forever until you told it to be one again the only other component that makes this special is a file called ETV dd. CYS uh this loads from config.sys on Startup uh as a device driver but I should point out that under dos driver was a much looser definition than what we think of nowadays it's mostly just a chunk of code that's left sitting in memory with some interrupt vectors pointing to it and what you could do with that was pretty wide ranging the prim primary function of this driver is to make the printer work see the actual typewriter mechanism shows up as a parallel printer if I just uh type in some junk here and I send that to lpt1 uh which is the Dos uh virtual device for the parallel port it prints it just like that but I don't think that the typewriter mechanism actually is connected to a conventional parallel port because if I remove that driver from config.sys then nothing happens when I try to print so in other words this driver seems to be emulating a parallel port device I'll ruminate more on that later but it also does more than that all right I just took out the aletti software and I rebooted using my dos 6 disc that I made from scratch on my PC the only thing I've brought over here is that etd.sys the S swp software isn't even present and yet if I hit the typewriter button look at that it pops right up and I can type stuff uh this actually even works if I'm in another program all right this is Dos edit which didn't come out for like 5 years after this machine was made but if I hit the typewriter button it pops right up over it I can type some crap and then when I hit the button again it goes right back to my program this kind of trick was not uncommon in the Dos era it's another very early rudimentary form of multitasking that's usually executed via something called a TSR but apparently the same trick can be done with a device driver I had not known that here's another thing since this is pretending to be an ordinary parallel printer that means I can hit print screen and it'll print the screen think you're off sides there bud this is neat but it brings us to a very important issue if I'm honest I didn't actually hit print screen I hit shift and the delete key now a normal PC keyboard doesn't have a delete key it has a backspace but on a typewriter the term backspace simply means to move the type head back a character you can't delete with a typewriter so already already maintain that behavior you hit this in s swp it just moves back it doesn't actually delete if you want to move back and delete well you need a new key for that so they added this one but if you're not in the S swp software backspace does exactly what it would on a normal PC on the other hand if I hit this delete key it prints an asterisk unless I hold shift in which case it prints the screen like I showed you now this threw me for a loop for a couple of days until I thought to take a look at an original PC keyboard and remembered that print screen used to be on the asteris key it was actually that way all through the at keyboard all the way up until the model M when IBM completely changed the keyboard layout I keep forgetting how weird the early PC keyboard was before that point look at one sometimes it's it's like a get from Mars now this machine came out years after that change happened but I guess since it was based on XT era Hardware they kept the old school key codes unfortunately however they didn't go with any of the standard layouts as far as I can tell every normal PC key is on here but some are very hard to find uh for instance the uh faint gray labels on the left key block reveal that these are the function keys and they're actually in the same place they'd be on a normal keyboard I mean not one that would come with a new PC in 1988 but these are where a lot of PC users were used to seeing them at the time it's still very hard to read the labels though so using them is awkward uh the numpad area is also quite a mess everything's been jumbled around all sorts of things have changed uh also the Escape key is labeled exit and it's all the way down here and and this is weird in several ways on the original PC keyboard Escape was in the upper left where we have it nowadays on the PC at keyboard it was at the upper left of the numpad for some reason but this placement is unlike both of those standard layouts great uh there's also a number of characters like the greater and lesser than signs and the backslash that only exist as these light gray labels and I couldn't figure out how to get to any of these for several days uh holding shift just gets you the capital letter from those buttons as it turns out these are on a third layer of symbols that you get to by holding a key that usually only exists on non us keyboards uh called alt graph but of course on this one it's way over in the corner and it's labeled kb2 yeah you know uh keyboard they finally made a sequel so in short if you're used to computers and you try to type on this thing you're going to feel like Sideshow Bob tripping with every step you take but despite that all the critical keys are here somewhere and that means that we should be able to run just about any piece of software so let's do that well that's not a valid command and just like that the ETV does have a spreadsheet but unlike the one on the Smith Corona it's not in aats visaal you know a relic of the Apple 2 ERA this is an actual complete full featured spreadsheet app that's not years out of date of course it's not the gold standard of the era either that would have been Lotus 123 which I wanted to show you cuz it was sort of The Benchmark by which people judged PC compatibility unfortunately I don't have original discs and the dis level copy protection made it impossible for me to make them so instead I'm running Lotus Symphony a lesser but still respected package and as far as I can tell it works perfectly um I figured out enough of the keys I'm able to for instance go in and load files there we go and I can you know adjust formulas and and whatnot maybe there's some special features that you wouldn't be able to access due to some key that's not actually on here I wouldn't know but more importantly I also don't know if it's necessarily worth the effort to find all them I don't know if this machine is worth the effort honestly or the price the ETV 2700 cost about $1,700 in 1988 that was considerably more than an equivalently speced PC maybe on par with a PC clone and a printer sold as a bundle though as I said there are reasons someone might not want to replace their typewriter with a computer Compu but at the point where you're wanting to run existing software why bother buying this instead of a PC I mean hell porway no lost dose unless you were really cramped for space just keep the typewriter for the occasional pre-printed or multi-part form use the PC for everything else that seems like a much better use of your time than trying to train yourself to run Lotus through this Enigma machine of a keyboard it would make a lot more sense if you could plug in an external keyboard and use a normal layout but olivetti didn't provide a port for some reason in fact they didn't provide much in the way of interfaces there are for instance no parallel or serial ports despite those being absolutely Universal on all PCS by 1988 now the first one I get the typewriter is your line printer so I I guess you can get away without a parallel port but why no serial those have been Universal for years and this thing could have dialed into a remote system and operated like a 1960 style TTY terminal and I know there were people who would have appreciated that there are also no expansion slots or at least no ordinary ones on the back here next to the video ports there's this big funky multi-pin thing not going to spend a lot of time speculating but suffice to say that's probably an Isa port in Disguise um one ad did claim that there was a 20 megab hard drive accessory that probably plugged in there it probably included its own controller card there's also mention in the software of a communication mode uh but when you pick it it just complains that the communication module isn't present this makes me suspect that there actually Was a Serial Port add-on that would have plugged in there so yeah this is probably a slot but I doubt you could have added any preferral of your own and while we're talking about weird ways of doing normal PC things I got a comment on the memory situation I don't know that it's a problem it's just kind of strange and I couldn't figure out where else to mention it in the script this machine is more or less a PC XT right I mean it's got a weird CPU but architecturally it's closest to an XT yet if we peek under this little cover on the back we find Sim memory modules and those weren't really a thing until well into the 286 era upgrading the RAM on XTS always involved stuffing a bunch of raw dip ic's into sockets or buying an Isa card with a bunch of dip ic's on it and even really late XT boards still worked that way as far as I can tell so this seems kind of out of place even stranger though per what little published info I can find this machine claims to max out at 768k while normal XT machines maxed out at 640k and that's generally taken as an unbreachable barrier from what I've heard however this is not actually a hardware limitation it's just due to how the PC used memory mapped IO so there were clones that expanded on this but I wonder how much software was actually able to take advantage of it without modifications another thing that's weird and maybe bad is the monitor situation I'm sure as we discussed with the video signal being so strange the only display that would have ever worked with this was the one that came with the machine and that sucks but the monitor itself was probably pretty good it was apparently 12 in the same size as IBM's original PC display and it was monochrome so I'm sure it looked great even if it definitely looked strange perched up on those weird little monitor arms that all of Eddie seem to love but if you didn't like it for some reason or if it broke well too bad because thanks to the bizarre proprietary video interface you couldn't replace it with anything else that sucks and an even more concrete complaint is that this machine operates solely in MDA text mode an astonishing limitation for 1988 MDA was unspeakably ancient at this point given that PCS were selling with EGA and even VGA cards MDA on the other hand originated with the first IBM PC 7 years earlier and it seemed anacronismo you could just include a Hercules compatible card instead they were cheaper and much more capable the herk was basically an MDA card if IBM had finished it it's pretty much the same design it just has enough RAM for a full screen frame buffer they were incredibly popular and I suspect that IBM wanted to make something like it and if RAM prices in 1981 had been just a little bit cheaper they probably would have and the Texton MDA never would have existed by the time the ETV 2700 came out however 7 years after all that happened memory prices had plummeted so it's wild that they would go with this prehistoric video standard I mean sure the ETV was only meant for text editing but if they were selling it as a PC why exclude all the Hercules compatible business software already on the market this is even more shocking when you realize that all ofet was not limited to whatever they could afford to buy by all appearances they made the graphics Hardware in here from scratch I don't normally do blowby blows of disassembling stuff but I was surprised at how nice it is to take this thing apart so I wanted to share this with you there's only a couple screws one at the back and then two at the front and by the way if you ever get one of these things the front screws are these very strange 5.5 mm hex heads so you want the exact same driver that you'd use to take apart an IBM modelm keyboard if you happen to have one of those with those bolts out you then have to press in a tab and Slide the floppy drive cover forward to remove it then you press a plastic tab near the back of the chassis and the top cover lifts right off unplug the ribbon from the typewriter Carriage then four or five cables from the various Motors and then the the entire typewriter mechanism just lifts right out now remove about eight more hex heads holding on the RF shield and lift it up to reveal the motherboard how easy was that so here's the motherboard and boy howdy is it a weird one most PC motherboards at the time had a lot more chips than this since they used ordinary CPUs that needed tons of support Hardware all the features that are integrated into the v40 mean that it requires very little support Hardware as a result almost everything we can see apart from the CPU seems to be purpose built for this particular machine and it's all indecipherable this here is the v40 CPU itself this is a bios chip and I think this is another one the Ram's back here there's a single stick of soldered on memory and then two slots one of which is occupied so presumably both of these sticks are 256s since this machine apparently has 512k of ram right now you could add one more 256 to reach that 768k Max but that's all the easy Parts after that it's all black boxes this NEC chip I can't find a data sheet for that at all this TI chip is a gate array so it's sort of like an fpga meaning it has completely custom internal functionality that can't be determined from the outside likewise the remaining chips are all from vsi a well-known vendor of custom silicon so it's impossible to say what any of them do without burning the tops off and reverse engineering the Silicon dyes all we have are the cryptic code names on top octane oxide and overnight so it's impossible for me to tell you anything about how this work works except that it doesn't work like anything else almost all clones that implemented a standard IBM Graphics interface were built around the jellybean MC 6845 CRT controller or they used a third party drop-in chip from ATI or chips or Technologies or whoever but this one simply has no Hardware inside that isn't purpose-built so it goes without saying that alletti had to have designed their own completely Custom Graphics array and that makes sense since this doesn't actually output anything remote like MDA video the original IBM MDA card and the Hercules which worked with the same monitors used a TTL signal that means that unlike the typical analog waveform used in composite TV signals and the like which maxes out at about a volt these cards output digital signals that are either on or off and they're at about 3 1/2 volts they also use separate horizontal and vertical sync signals like VGA and they ran at 50 htz that may seem strange given that they were sold in the US but text only displays don't have much action going on so you can use longer persistence phosphors and scan them less frequently reducing the load on the video Hardware this is why old green CRTs have visible ghosting when text Scrolls up the screen this video interface on the other hand does nothing like any of that I'm certain it's MDA from a software perspective but the hardware is from Mars it scans 70 HZ if the GBS is to be believed it does not use TTL levels but rather a fairly normal composite style signal that never exceeds 1.2 volts and it uses a composite sync format that's integrated into the video signal as we can see in the oscilloscope Trace I feel pretty confident saying that there's nothing else in existence that outputs this exact signal unless it came out of all of Eddie's Labs cuz there's really no reason to make anything that works like this I mean look at brother when they wanted an MDA like output they just used MDA they didn't even change the pin out why bother their word processor monitor works on a PC and the PC monitor works on their word processor because using parts that already exist costs less money why fight the feeling well I'm lost on why they used an RCA plug but I think I can at least explain the high refresh rate if we look at a picture of the olivet's original monitor it looks to be white white phospher has a much lower persistence than green or Amber so it has to be scanned faster to maintain a clear image my Smith Corona for instance uses white phosphor and it seems to scan at 60 HZ I can't illustrate this on camera for you but trust me it's like staring into a strobe light the flicker is horrible now if you're thinking hey wait a minute didn't everyone's monitors run at 60 HZ in the late '90s yes an awful lot did and they were murder on the eyes a lot of people just didn't know how to recognize that those that did went out and bought monitors that could run at 70 HZ switching to a higher refresh rate clears up the flickering unfortunately in the late 80s it also carried the cost of engineering a completely unique CRT and Driver circuitry but apparently that was worth it to all of edti for some reason maybe green screens were considered G at that point but even if the answer to that question seems clear enough we still have many more questions the amount of effort that all put into this thing doesn't seem to match up with the return if they wanted a machine that could run PC software this was not the way to do it it's not terribly compelling as a PC given the weird keyboard and non-existent Graphics support among other things it isn't a good form factor for a general purpose PC it has no expandability its base specs were not great for the era and it was expensive I almost feel like all of Eddie didn't want to make a PC at all but why do so in that case most other word processors on the market were z80 based so why go with x86 except to pursue PC compatibility and why build a PC if you aren't going to do a better job than this I don't know but in the end that is what they did and that means that this is a PC no matter what their intent was and the beauty of the PC platform the thing that keeps me fascinated with it is the same thing I always lament every PC at least after the compatible clone Market exploded in 1985 is essentially the same they come off the Taco Bell menu you can add this peripheral or that you use this CPU or that one but you're always starting with ground beef cheese lettuce and tortillas that means that everything defaults to working I picked Lotus Symphony because it was easy to run from a single floppy but any MDA capable program should function on here for instance suppose you don't like the S swp software but you like the typewriter mechanism uh you you could just load up whatever you're comfortable with here I got a copy of Word star which I mentioned earlier we can go in and load a document here and yeah look at that all of our files imagine showing the user the information that they need to know when you're asking them the question who knew here's a file this uh seems to be working perfectly we should even be able to print print a file one copy no no one I'm getting owned here oh there we go there it is everything works perfectly there might be uh text formatting features in this software that wouldn't work on here uh I don't know but for the most part it looks like any old program will run on this thing the fact the printer Works seems the most surprising and maybe that's because all ofet wanted to make sure that all software would work fine on here but it's also possible that they just saw the least friction in making this follow the PC convention that one prints by sending data to the parallel port it's just easiest to do things on the PC platform by doing them the right way and all that means that even on this heavily constrained system with its outdated and bizarre Graphics its limited memory and confusing keyboard you can actually play some video games obviously I'm talking about text Adventures for the most part but you can also run Rogue on here you missed the bat you missed the bat the bat hits you you missed the bat you missed the bat I'm about to lose to a single bat I got an excellent hit on the bat hey I won this may seem like a stretch for the sake of the bit but you want to know something wild this game which is 43 years old at this point is still pretty fun you should try it sometime if you haven't it has most of the core experience experiences of a modern action RPG and it's not even that hard to figure out it even has an in-game help feature when I was testing this thing before writing the script I found myself just sitting and playing this for much longer than I intended because I was having a good time with a game from 1982 that runs entirely in text mode that's pretty wild but here's something Wilder Rogue didn't start out on the PC it started out on Deck mini computers the only reason it got a PC Port is because its original developer got a job at all of etti when they were developing their first PC compatible machine I didn't know that when I picked Rogue for this demo I found out much later I only picked Rogue because it pretty much runs on everything in fact I probably could have done this same gag with a much older machine also from alletti see before they pivoted to making PC Hardware alletti built computers based on z80 CPUs and the CPM operating system including the early products in the ETV series well as it happens Rogue also received a CPM Port the hilarious result result of this is that I'm able to run the game on my Sony SM C70 a bizarre video processor unit from 1983 and thus I have no reason to think that I couldn't also run it on the ETV 300 oled's First computerized typewriter from 1982 so there it is I may have put a lot more words on the page for this video script than I had to but this is the only interesting word processor I'm likely to ever find so I made sure it got its due and now I cannot tell you how excited I am to get rid of the rest of these things because they do absolutely nothing for me that leaves me in a bit of a spot to be honest though I don't have anywhere to keep this thing but I can't bear to take it to the E cycle store where it'll sit unsold for 2 months and then get thrown in a dumpster I'm suddenly regretting my decision to accept this burden but I'm sure I'll find it a good home certainly it had one before I got it I was informed by the previous owner that when they received the machine it came with a data disc that still had some user documents on it and the last one was timestamped 2019 so either this thing sat in a closet for a few decades before someone inexplicably pulled it out to write some correspondence or it was in continuous use for 31 years that's kind of incredible I'm not that surprised that the computer portion still works but I'm very impressed that the print mechanism still functions despite being absolutely caked with what appears to be old dried out grease by all appearances this thing is a real trooper and I'm sure it has a few more years left to go but you can all breathe a sigh of relief now because this video doesn't we have finally reached the end thank you for watching and I just want to say um I made up a lot of this stuff so if you used one of these things back in the day please leave a comment I'd love to hear how wrong I am about all my assumptions especially if you have one of the CPM models to loan me that'd be pretty dope but if you just enjoyed the video then consider subscribing to my channel so I know you like this sort of thing remember to turn on notifications if you want some slim chance of YouTube letting you know when when I upload again uh but if you really liked this then consider supporting me on patreon like these people here are doing this channel is my sole source of income and I'm going through some rough times in life right now a lot of costly problems stacking up so I'm very thankful to my patrons who make it possible to get through all this crap without the additional stress of a day job all the same it does cost a lot to gather all this crap and pay for my studio and groceries and gas and so on so anything you can do to help out would be appreciated I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who's already supporting me though I couldn't do any of this without them so thank you all so much and everyone else thanks for watching

Channel: Cathode Ray Dude - CRD

Views: 160,513

Keywords: technology, retroelectronics, CRD

Id: 9lUhDo7euPs

Length: 70min 42sec (4242 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023