Michael GardiJust a small thing but I know I am going to need at least 40 console lights (try 86 when done) for this project. I'm also trying for a "vintage" look. So I come up with these based on the panel lights from the GENIAC computer:
The picture below does not do justice to how nice these look when lit:
Bonus these are really inexpensive to make, a few cents each. The cheapest I could find on Digi-Key was about 50 cents. I have posted the STL files and printing instructions on Thingiverse: Panel Mount LED Socket.
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Oooh, I like these :) I wonder how they'd do with eg Grain-of-Wheat bulbs...? Radio Shack (what's left of it) has their "12v jumbo red lamp" 2pk, which I rather like except for the depth -- they're long and skinny. Those are incandescent, too -- the bulbs inside look a bit like Christmas Tree bulbs (lol).
Silly me, I'm a bit of a purist for stuff like this. If it's prehistoric computing and I'm building it... if I have any choice, the only diodes will be in the power supply... dunno. I'm weird.
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The book was published in 1967. LEDs were invented in 1962 and available in the 60s so I don’t feel I’m too far offside.
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OK, that's confusing to me -- I had heard somewhere that the first commercially viable LED was a Monsanto production circa 1971, an extremely dim red dome with a brass or gold collar and a single lead out the bottom (the collar being the other "lead"), which was priced at a nickel apiece in single-part quantities.
Now I'm not gonna argue -- you clearly know more than I do, so I must and will defer -- but I would like to understand (a) who *actually* put out the first reasonably saleable LED and what it looked like and all, and (b) how I could've been misled by what sounds to be nearly a full decade.
School me :D seriously.
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Although not definitive, here is what I looked at: https://www.electronics-notes.com/articles/history/light-emitting-diode-led/led-history.php. From the section on Commercial LED history
"The first commercially available LEDs started to appear in the late/mid 1960s."
So cutting it close, though 3 mm high intensity parts were obviously many years in the future (as was hobby level 3D printing).
On a similar note, just to get it out of the way, my ALU uses relays (and not the old timey kind) and the Binary to Decimal Decoder is implemented with 7400 series ICs. Also I may have designed a couple of PCBs for this project.
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Interesting. I'll have to do some more investigating later...
Oh -- and you do you :) I'm not telling you how to do things -- that's not my job or business, and I know it! I was just saying how *I* like to do things. You're fine...
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