What the Hell Is It?

Huh. Never would've imagined such a product exists.

Now that you mention it, I don't believe I've seen any others like it. It came with the camera.
In context, it makes sense. The Olympus camera used XD cards, which are quite small; just a bit larger than miniSD cards. It's an old camera, so the capacity of the cards was not what they are now. This little gadget allowed you to carry a half dozen cards. The device protected the cards' contacts and it would slip easily into a pocket.

Explain what this is, and what is is used for.

Obviously a set of switches for controlling some device in various rooms. No way of knowing what the device is other than just guessing.

So guess.

You've had all the clues before.

Robots?

Escape Pods?

Speakers?
Nah. That's too weird.

Booby Traps?

Lights?

Heating?

Warp Drive?

_Howard wrote:

Lights?

Bingo.

NoCoPilot wrote:

My dad also designed several other touches uniquely his. Most of the light switches are low voltage and programmable via a bank of relays out in the garage. There are about ten of them that control six different outlets each.

Lights was the obvious answer, but I just wanted to fart around a bit first.

I have no idea what thread that quote was from, and I sure as hell wasn't going to read the entire site looking for hints.

You??? "Fart around"???

I am shocked, I tell you, SHOCKED.

I would believe that if you had used an exclamation point.

Oh, what the hell.

Come on, NoCo. Surely you must have at least one of these around.

I don't vape.

Do you spin?

People are often telling me to "sit and spin" but I'm never sure what that means.

Look closer.
I'm sure you can see the point.

Some kind of loupe for examining, I dunno, turntable needles?

I once saw a totally cool stereo microscope, where you could examine your needle in 3D. Alas, it was expensive and I was poor.

Bingo. A small scope for examining the needle.

Uh, something from the Jurassic computer age. Programmer's console perhaps, with a tape cartridge drive on the upper left perhaps? That looks like a tape on the upper right. Some of the keys on the keyboard look like dedicated programming commands. The display/monitor must be just off camera, attached to the metal frame seen on the left.

Whatever it is, Ada Lovelace used one.

Close enough. That is a tape cartridge on the upper left. There is no monitor, however.
This is the display. It's twelve or maybe sixteen characters.


I was scrounging around on ebay yesterday and ran into it. There are quite a few for sale there. I was surprised as it's very old. The device is a label printer from 1984-85. To the best of my recollection, it was the first device of its type.

It uses a thermal print head and has an Intel 8052 controller. The clock is a whopping 12 MHz, and there are 16K bytes of RAM. To protect the print head from burning up and to ensure the quality of the type, it has a real time operating system. All of the firmware was written by two programmers: me and a guy named Chris who made his bones at Xerox PARC.

In another thread we decried the misuse of high level languages today. For grins, here is the instruction set for the 8052. That's all that was used for writing the firmware.

WTF? Photobucket deleted a bunch of my photos. Everything except the Bernie Bug.

Here's one that may be really easy or impossible.

Side view with size:



End View (both ends look the same)