Hello friends - hope you enjoy this peek into the lab over the past week!
After a bout with some mysterious keyboard ailment, our Pink Commodore SX-64 is working again. We were able to carefully clean the membrane and return it to full functionality, which is important because it’s the best machine to play Infocom’s Plundered Hearts. If you aren’t familiar with the history of this machine, check out Benj Edward’s interview with Felicia Day - discussion of this special little machine starts around 27 minutes in. We were also able to diagnose some joystick issues and a couple of stuck keys on our standard Commodore 64, thanks to that handy diagnostics cartridge you can see in the cartridge slot. The cartridge is from Coprolite Computer By-Products, a name we are not too grown up to giggle at whenever we see it.
Lori and libi finished assembling an FM radio transmitter kit (available on Tindie) and did some playing around with transmitting both using the audio in and the microphone as audio sources, and receiving with a couple of different radios. This is part of an ongoing series of Other Networks explorations, many of which Lori has detailed on her website.
One of the radios above (the little GE transistor radio) came back to us this week along with this Victor manual adding machine. Both were away being repaired and cleaned by friend of the lab Jerry. After dropping those machines off, he came back to pick up some additional devices for repair - a special treat for his 14th birthday.
As part of an ongoing effort to make an XR tour of the lab (a collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh), MAL Pal Caileigh has been scanning all the material in our APF Imagination Machine I and II collection. Eventually that will all be available for viewing online - there’s some really beautiful and charming stuff, and a lot of it is signed by Ed Smith.
ICYMI, we’ve published the second call for submissions for our ephemera zine, ephemerMAL. Find all the details in last week’s newsletter, along with a link to download the first issue.
Finally, one of the submissions for the next zine that we’ve already received touches on an ongoing research interest here at MAL - that being, what is it to have nostalgia for a thing you’ve never actually experienced? What does it mean to miss something you never knew? If you have thoughts on this general topic, we’d love to hear them - feel free to email us or leave comments on this post.
We’ll be skipping next week’s post, but we’ll be back the week after. Happy almost summer!
- MAL -