Media blitz with pamphlets....this is a 60 year old Indiegogo/Kickstarter.

When misguided over-the-top engineering and clueless marketing conspire to make a contraption that should not pass sniff test in either department, yet it still goes through. I’m with you, what’s not to like about it, I really wish it existed! Of course, it would never happen today (Windows 8 anyone?) ;-)

The 22 page brochure at archive.org/details/TNM_Datastrobe_full-alphabet_readout_display_-_Ra_20170911_0159/page/n5/mode/2up has page 6 showing, "See for yourself. For a free demonstration in your office, contact your nearest Raytheon Regional Sales Office..." This suggests they might have had one, or a few, working items. Of course, it is still possible it was a vapor product and they would stonewall or deflect or something. Or maybe what they might have to demonstrate was more of an engineering sample rather than a finished polished product.

Holy smokes! What's next - a steam-powered display? "And over here, you have the auxiliary fuel tank with compressed coal gas."

So, Fran... when are YOU going to try building one? LOL It sounds so crazy, I'd LOVE to see a prototype of one.

I “knew a guy”...His last job before retirement was head of R & D for Meyer Sound Laboratories in California. He had quite the collection of electronics acquired over the years. One of his jobs before landing the MSL gig was touring video screen tech in the ‘70’s with Elvis or Neil Diamond (or maybe both). He had a B&W large screen video projector left over from that era that seemed to work off a similar principle . (One complete, one for parts if I recall) It was about the size of a household refrigerator, and it involved a rotating drum about 8” dia.x 12”, that would “silk screen” the image onto the drum in liquid form, one frame per revolution, X number of frames per sec. (I’m unsure if it was at, above or below the 24/sec. standard). Sadly those projectors and loads of other cool & rare mid-20th century technology in his collection was lost in a California wildfire a few years back.

I hope you find out something from some old Raytheon engineer somewhere!

When quality hits the fan, and Fran is back!! This is the fran we all know and love. Not that we dont love you when you are not yourself.. But you know, when you thrive, your content is lively and happy. I like to see you happy.

In reading all of the brochure, this is clearly more than a "me too" display just done with ponderous technology. Some of the brochure description was, "Besides the usual options - floating decimal point, polarity, special mounting, special codes, etc. - the standard Datastrobe permits, with a custom mask, features not found in other readouts. Symbols and characters of any language and in any type face can be displayed. Individual characters or the entire display background can be colored for warnings, special indications, etc. Also, word messages can be displayed since there are no separations between the columns. In addition to visual readout, the Datastrobe subsystem can be used as a high speed optical printer. The light output from a single flash is sufficient to expose direct readout, dry process materials, such as linograph paper, or xerox plate." You may be right that this thing was TV-like in a way. And it was probably a solution in search of a problem.

You're right about CRT displays in the late '60's, early '70's. The first digital calculators I encountered all had green phosphor CRT's with a 2-3 inch size.

Somewhere in middle America there is a big box sitting full of dust in someones garage...😌💭💡🏚️💡🏚️💡🏚️

Sounds really portable. With the right size crane.

Wow! Now this something that I remember. I got into electronics in 1968 (ham radio), and went to work in Silicon Valley in 1974. My buddies and I read Popular Science, Popular Electronics, QST. Many of us had a parent working for Fairchild or National Semiconductor. We visited every electronic store we could bicycle to (Radio Shack, Battery of the Month Club) and scoured the military surplus stores for electronic components when we could convince a parent to drive us some twenty miles. Still, I know it was in the periodicals of the time. Never saw one, though.

I´m always so impressed by the fact that the calculator Texas Instrument TI30 is always in the same position on Fran´s desk.

I love your research into old quirky displays!

Fran keep on being Fran. Thanks for the enlightenment. Regards Tony

You are right Fran - this really would have been the Baird tv of the digit display world - they were surely just testing response to their concept - I'd love to see an actual working version, even if it's only nailed together out of plywood and sounds like a vacuum cleaner :o)

It is wonderful to see you so excited and cheerful!!!

Datastrobe- trademark 843,672 got cancelled in 1974, 5-6 years after it was published. That's relevant because it's very hard for someone competing to cancel a trademark after a five year period, the only reasons that might apply: 1)Its abandoned 2)it defines a functional use 3) it's generic 3 is way out, 2 might be possible- strobe has connotations in addressing and ram, but I don't know about at this time So probably 1- they never made anything with it.

It's not uncommon in the vintage electronics hobby to come across literature for items that were in development that never made it to production. I was working on a Signal One transceiver last year, and came across a photo advertisement marketing a separate transmitter/receiver the company was developing at one time. Mock-ups were made for the photos, but the items were never produced. Sometimes these ads were put out as "feelers" other times economics put a stop to the production. Marketing in those days was a process as a slow as the product development, today one can develop something and have it out there for people to see in seconds.

Cool hat, Fran. Thanks for all the cool content.

Commenting for the algorithm. This video deserves it!

Fran talking about the cryptid of old lab displays. There’s a soviet calculator that used the same type of strobe light and rotating drum display seen here if you’re curious kzfaq.info/get/bejne/n6mZfbZkp7uUmWg.html

Tune in next week to see Fran dismantle a datastrobe

Ooh! Off topic but. @7:53, the Sylvania ad. The flat CRT at the four O'clock position! I saw one of these in the heyday of the surplus stores with what appeared to be an orange phosphor and burn in that suggested it had been used as a single line dot matrix alpha-numeric display (as just a bare tube, for what I'll never know). I passed it up .. $20 was real money back then and I had no use for it .. I've always regretted that, and a (relatively) recent search wasn't even able to come up with an image.

You need to do flapper displays. Xerox made a variant of this that exposed a printer drum instead of projecting a display. Laser printers quickly replaced it, of course.

Well usually the marketing department is well known to sell things that the engineering department never thought of... 😉. I'm always pleased to see your videos!

I LOVE your bench!! 🥰 It makes mine look clean!!! 😄

I would hasten to add I have seen the Tucker Torpedo at three or four car shows. And actually had one offered to me for only $75,000. Seeing at the time if I spent over $500 on a car. I felt I'd gotten jipped. I turned down the offer to be one of the few the proud the Tucker Torpedo owners. He did have some cars. He just didn't have the capability to produce them in Mass. And the big three auto companies shut him right the hell down. True! The Securities and Exchange Commission brought him up on charges of selling cars that he hadn't made yet. But he was found innocent of all those charges. Unfortunately by that time the reputation of the Tucker automobile company was destroyed.

You had me at motorised 🤣😂🤣😂🤣

My feeling is, there may have been ONE functioning unit in a lab somewhere that they could drive to a location for a requested demo, but they failed to generate enough interest to pull the trigger for production. The market already had a plethora of displays, with other varieties coming around the corner; and like you mentioned, a large heat-generating unit requiring fan cooling (and, according to the pamphlet, an external power source) simply wouldn't be practical in most applications with other "flavors" already in widespread use. And, while there have been some amazingly-cool implementations of displays, we all know how and why the 7-segment LED display reigned supreme for so long. To be honest, though, I like the character of designs that DIDN'T make the cut, and I also like seeing how engineers in the past implemented the technology of the era to make the ones that DID. Roughly 30 years ago, I threw away a General Electric alarm clock radio - it was a flip-clock, numbers were luminous paint, with a tiny black light bulb at the bottom to illuminate the digits. I tossed it out because the clock motor stopped. Kicking myself in the butt now, I wish I had kept it and fixed it up. The radio sounded really good, too.

I used to know several people who worked for Ratheon, but that was many years ago when I lived in El Paso. I wonder if there may be a similar German design that exists as there may be some post-war collaboration that is yet unseen lol

Make it water-cooled and sell it to gamers!

I had a printer that worked in a similar way: a 'strobe' interacting with a rotating drum! The print element was a single solenoid driving a narrow steel wedge that was the 'strobe'. The wedge would hit the ribbon, the ribbon would hit the paper, but the paper could 'duck out of the way', leaving no imprint. How did it make marks on the paper? A rotating platen behind the paper had ridges down its length that would serve as a 'pinch-points' where wedge, ribbon, paper and ridge lined up. As the platen turned, the wedge would strike in a coordinated manner, forming patterns of dots on the paper we call information. Sounded like a very angry dot-matrix printer...that one little wedge had to do all the work of a gang of pins! The wedge could print 11 dots vertically per pass, and was angled slightly to compensate for print-head movement. To print a vertical line, the wedge would strike 11 times as the platen rotated under it. To print a horizontal line, the wedge would strike as the ridge on the platen was in the right position. It actually featured bi-directional printing! But it treated every print-job as one massive bit-mapped image, so a single letter 'a' at the bottom of a page might take a long time to print! All those empty lines...but you had to 'print' them! Thankfully, the wedge didn't buzz the whole time, but the print-head still had to traverse the entire page! There were a few built-in fonts that could fast-print with actual line-feeds, but it had only three fonts in 4 sizes, with bold and italic for each font. It might take over 3 minutes to process a print-job; the print manager would convert your fonts to bitmaps...slow, slow slow, but decent quality! Another 'bonus' was being able to cut mimeo stencils directly! There was a switch that would shift the ribbon out of the way! If nobody was watching, it did a fine job printing on thin metal foil...many tiny hammer-strikes...nice embossed patterns on copper foil! It was a Radio Shack printer, don't recall the model...Toshiba under the hood, 1982(?) The hard plastic platen didn't last long; even before I printed on copper, regular paper-printing was rounding off the ridges.

I spent a minute looking for the closed captions but I guess they're turned off :( It really helps for when I can't hear the video well due to background noise.

Your mentioning of the Sylvania CRTs reminded me of what Tektronix did with their 7000 series oscilloscopes soon after. They added the scale factor or other message displays to the edge of the screen as VECTOR entities (rather than raster). I lack info about the models and years when this happened, but I myself have a reference in model 7834 that has a 7D15 plug in module counter. Its results are shown on the screen that way. In all likelihood the technology was first launched several years before the 7834.

Thin possibility, but you could follow the IP trail through the decades. The most likely at least applied for and possibly were granted patents for components and the device as a whole. Even if the originals fall into the public domain, they may be cited in other patent applications. Also, the author's and agent's names can be examined individually and collectively, along with the firms they worked for, i.e. an original inventor may appear on another patent with co-team members. ( you probably already thought of this :-)

It looks feacible for a today's DIYer... Maybe some 3D printed parts, high intensity LEDs for column strobing, Arduino control... Maybe a reclaimed VHS head synchronous motor for spinning drum. The posibilities are out there without any other reason except we can do it because we can/it's funny/is intriguing...

Fran I know for a fact that the 'Port Arthur News' newspaper (located in Port Arthur Texas) used a printing press back in the mid to late seventies that had a mechanism similar to what you describe. I do not know if the imaging system in this printing press was made by Raytheon. I do know that I was repairing electronic calculators in that time period and had to make a call to the 'press room' to work a a Victor electronic calculator and complained to the press operator that it was freezing in there. He apologized for the cold temperature but said the new electronic imaging system in their new press ran hot and since it was highly technical and had a lot of digital electronics in it that needed the cooling. I quizzed him as to how the thing worked and explained that a computer sent the text to the printer and the characters were transferred to an electrostatic print medium of some sort by a rotating drum of characters being scanned by some incredibly bright arc lamp. This sounds like something similar to the Raytheon device you are talking about that was re-purposed as the heart of a printing press. Sort of a giant laser printer, without the laser ? Unfortunatly i was in a hurry and did not have time to quiz the pressman about any other particulars. They stopped printing the paper long ago and I have no Idea what became of the press. May be a lead you could pursue ? Godfrey

Mask face, mask ear, mask nose. Truly, a sign of the times. Another gem Fran, thanks a bundle! And I see that Dialight in the back, being all bright and neon-y

I've looped back several times now, to MASK FACE and chuckled every time=P

LOL, Bairds TV's - I'm surprised to hear you mention them. Everybody around here had one at one time,I live in the city where they were made lol. (assembled at least,they had sites in other locations making sub assemblies) , I watched them as a nipper and remember as an 80's kid with an interest looking at loads of old dumped 60's and 70's Baird's tellies(What do all these glass things that glow up do??lol). I have friends and relatives that have worked at Baird's too. ATB.

for those of us who play video games there is a category of product that covers for software the same niche that items like the datastrobe occupy in electronics-- vaporware.

I believe they built a prototype in their lab. This is how they were able to come up with a pricing structure and the drawings of them. I've been working in electronics since the mid 60s and never seen any type of data strobe as being described. During the 60s I saw devices using alpha numeric displays using lights, and Nixie Tubes. I was doing support and service on Favag Swiss clock systems. At the time these were horribly expensive to buy and to maintain.

What are the projectors they used at mission control for the big screen. Don't remember the name

One of the first examples of brochure-ware and vapourware!

hey fran.. what is the make/model of the magnifying glass you use?

I think this was the display tech slated to be used on the Turbo Encabulator.

At that point why not “just” do a mini CRT?

So, high speed spinney thing, bright blinding light, high voltage, high noise. Yep, seems like something we want to have :P

One of those dare and do things, like Zilog's Z800 which, I think, was the first 8/16 bit processor with backward compatibility. I had a big, heavy, book with all the datasheets (remember - this was from before the internet days) and had it all figured out. I had my schematics ready, was working on a PCB layout and ordered parts from a local Zilog distributor only to find out that those chips were never made 😢

Fran, I love that hat and glasses combo on you..... you look beautiful.

I need one of these to hook up to my Turboencabulator!

Dialight box shows -7.03. Fran's assigning a score for Raytheon?

Sounds like it's time to get the team together! This thing is too cool and absurd to not try to make.

Could there really be a more perfect display? From some stuff I found the early version had an external magnetic memory drum as well (later development apparently integrated the drum into the character drum).

Given the timeframe of this (mid-1960's) I would guess this may have been developed for a military application like a Viet Nam-era aircraft or Apollo-era spacecraft that was not funded. Then they tried to sell the technology commercially to recover the investment. It was trademarked in 1967.

Trial balloons and market testing precedes many hyped products that never happen. I have tried to purchase listed specified integrated circuits that never got off paper.

That was right around the time Tom Phillips’ intense campaign for consumer and nongovernment commercial market expansion would see Raytheon’s annual sales exceed $1 Billion, their first stock split and Phillips emerge as Raytheon’s CEO. I get the feeling they were hawking everything but the cocktail napkins.

In my part of the world, the skin irritation caused my a mask is called "mascne"...

The amount of over-engineered alternatives fielded to the nixie tube is kind of overwhelming. It's kinda telling that the immediate replacement was panaplex, which was just about the same thing with some clever upgrades.

Fantastic Hat.

Another mention, on page 385 of the pdf / page 377 of the scanned document. apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/631663.pdf Best part is how the caption says, "Production model of the Datastrobe" - and then the labeling of the one of the components says, "Electronic decoding circuit-pak could be here", pointing to an empty space.

It sounds like they got partway down the road toward developing this thing and then got the memo that 7-segmemt LED displays were about to become a thing and be better in every way, and sensibly stopped development. Interestingly, VF displays came on the scene around the same time... it's odd they did not appear earlier, given they're pretty much vacuum-tube technology.

Sounds like they were trying to miniaturize the Houston bat cave 😂

The Turbo Encabulator comes to mind.

Was the patent issued on April 1st? ;)

A wall of readout displays of every kind needs to exist. Each one for a different thing.

Just needs to be refined , the heavy electric motor can be replaced with a light weight , simple gas turbine , the energy hungry , short lived , xenon lamp can be replaced with a cool long lasting Radium light source , and the lead shielding will serve a dual purpose as a sound absorber assuring wisper quiet operation .

We need to make that a kickstarter

So, of course now you need to build a proof of concept machine for this! Any item you cannot build yourself, outsource it to some other youtuber and make a collaboration effort. This thing is so crazy it needs to be done.

I guess producing these brochures was a cheaper alternative to patenting the thing. By showing everyone how insane their future product was, they made sure no one tried to copy it.

Baird referred to his television as a "televisor". Modern display technology is far less interesting compared with the physical, mechanical and electromechanical systems from years gone by. The, potentially, mythical Datastrobe seems very interesting as a concept but also very impractical.

Raytheon engaged in what we call today "marketecture" or "vaporware".

Neat. I really hope there's a surviving prototype at least, since this would be really cool to see in action

I wonder if it could have actually been a sphere that a light shone through, working on the same mechanics as the 'golf ball' in a golf ball typewriter. The advantage being less chance of mechanical failure and faster changing between characters.

$40 column really is $40 per symbol columns aka number of digits. And each colum is described by one BCD value. So actual text can only be displayed as a stencil. The smaller model has a drum able to hanfle up to 3 columns. The bigger model has dual lamps and can then handle up to 6 digits/columns.

One way to create artificial gravity on the way to Mars and more distant planets would be to have a constant acceleration and then at the half way point more or less shut down the engines, flip the ship around and then have a constant deacceleration the rest of the way there. Of course, the first problem would be to carry enough fuel to burn for that long or make the fuel and engines more efficient (like what happened in The Expanse books/show), and to also have some sort of engines and craft that could accelerate for a long enough period of time and handle the insane speeds. (I didn't take the time to do the math to figure out how long you'd be able to accelerate at 1 G before reaching light speed! ;-) If the distances were too far, a reasonable period of zero G in the middle of the trip wouldn't be so bad and for really really long distances several acceleration/deacceleration cycles might be needed? Of course we'll need to wait for new technologies I'm assuming? We've only been using gasoline for less than 150 years and jet/rocket fuel even less time so, maybe a few hundred years from now we'll be flying around the solar system like we do the planet now days? 🙂

It's not clear from the description exactly how this worked. If there's just one strobe lamp, there must have been some kind of horizontal scanning mechanism as well. Or maybe shutters that let light onto selected columns of the drum?

Sometimes companies put something like that out in marketplace just to see what the response might be. Sort of the "Run it up the flag pole and see if anyone salutes" marketing method. If it is well received and queries to buy it roll in, then maybe it becomes a project. Otherwise, unbeknownst at the time, but now knownst to us, it will eventually be fodder for a Fran Blanche video.

was the press release on Apr 1st?

Cool video.

I recently saw an Arduino robotic clock project which draws out the time in SAND.

How's about that 6volt PP9 Duracell you keep on your bench...is that a "tucker, raytheon" inspired object d'art or watt??

An ad on pg 37: dev.informationdisplay.org/Portals/InformationDisplay/IssuePDF/V03N01-1966%20JanFeb.pdf Would they have gone to EG&G for the tiny strobe?

The practice of selling non-existent product was still raging in the 1980's with the Atari RANA disk drive. We raved over it's specs. But if you look closely at the magazine ads of that era, you'll see the device was a mock up. It did eventually arrive but only after they had enough feedback to know it would sell. The dark side of Capitalism.

Cool idea and probably fried your internal bits :D

Sound kind of like the raster system of a laser printer. Instead of the photo-magnetic drum as target, something that fluoresces under the laser.

There doesn't appear to be a patent for this. If there had been, at the time they would have had to supply a model.

i still remember lcds being shown on Tommorows World

I have one of these!! Well almost.......somewhere in the basement.......or in the shed. At least something similar. Well, not similar but a gadget thing and it is painted gray with wrinkle paint. The name on it is Åtvidaberg. Yes, I have to admit, it's something completely different.

Like the terms Vapourware and Fartware (Vapourware with a stink to it!) nothing much has changed..

Basically it is the guts of a laser line printer used as a display... I have seen similar things used for laser projection systems with two rotating prisms used to scan a laser beam over a grid.

Of course it exists, Fran. It’s currently boxed up and sitting right beside the Ark of the Covenant in that big warehouse we saw at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

Unreal.

What is/was its function and purpose again?

A variation on the 1969 SCM Kleinschmidt spin printer?

"If you build it, they will come!" Or sometimes not?

You should work out how it would have worked using the documents and have a go at making one, I'm sure lots of other enthusiasts would pitch in ideas to help :)

What are your thoughts about the quantum computer and the blockchain tech ?