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Hardware I Have KnownVarious and sundry hardware—mostly electronic—that I have owned and/or used over the years

by Bill Lise

Here are just a few stopping points on my hardware memory lane, starting back in the 1950s and running up until the point at which most hardware morphed into commodities made in a country that does not share the same values as the countries that use the hardware.

National Radio NC-98 Communications Receiver

I got my first amateur radio license when I was 10 years old, in 1955. This photo is from a larger photo of my ham shack, taken around 1955. The NC-98, coupled with a Globe Chief transmitter, was my first receiver and transmitter, which served me well during my year with a Novice amateur radio license. The NC-98 had what were referred to as slide rule frequency scales, with cursors driven by strings attached to round tuning knobs.

No matter how many years have past since owning this receiver, it still has an aura that cannot be matched by much more sophisticated receivers I subsequently used, including the R390 I used in the Navy.

J-38 Telegraph Key

This is the first telegraph key I used as an amateur radio operator, starting when I was in the fourth grade in New York. At the time, these were plentiful on Canal Street in Manhattan, which was lined with shops selling all varieties of WW2 electronic surplus equipment.

After a few years using this "straight key," I graduated to a Vibroplex bug that used a flexing element that vibrated to make Morse code dots, thereby eliminating the need to make dots individually, since all you needed to do was press the paddle to the right and release with a timing that allowed it to vibrate just the right number of times for the number of dots you wanted to send.

Vibroplex Bug

Early in the 20th century—the ad you see appeared in 1906—a telegraph key was developed that made it easier to send a series of dots. The Vibroplex bug brought that innovation and is still available, priced at a bit over USD 300. Dots were made by pushing the red paddle to the right and allowing the spring mechanism to oscillate a contact to generate the desired number of dots. Dashes were made more conventionally, but pushing the shorter, right-side paddle to the left.

My version was the Deluxe, which many amateur radio operators active those days will surely remember. I had that bug at least up until around 1967, when I was learning Russia at Defense Language Institute. The base permitted me to set up a radio shack in an unused building.

Teletype Corporation Model 33 (ASR33)

When I was working at Western Electric's Engineering Research Center in Princeton, NJ, the ASR33 Teletype terminal was our workhorse computer output device. We also had a storage-screen terminal made by Tektronix, the oscilloscope manufacturer, but this was our main output device. The ASR33 was painfully slow by today's standards, but was used by some to play computer games. One was a Startrek game that, after you fired a weapon, painfully printed out the next situation as you waited while the terminal clickety-clacked away. For communicating with people in other Bell System laboratories, we had an acoustic coupler, onto which we rested an analog telephone headset. The ASR33 was used on a daily basis to communicate with the DEC PDP10 timesharing system in the computer room. If you needed to use the IBM 360 in that same room, the output printer would be either a huge line printer or a Selectric typewriter output device.

Nikon 50mm/F1.4 Lens

This lens was manufactured before the Ai series of lenses appeared. I purchased it in Osaka one time while on an interpreting assignment and had it modified to fit on the Nikon D810 I had at the time. It is super heavy and has that wondrous heavy feel of lenses from the days when men were men and lenses were lenses.

These days, Nikon lenses are mostly made in Vietnam or China. They are much lighter, of course, and on a light body a lens like the one shown here would not be a good match in terms of balance. For the heavier, up-market models, however, these old lenses, performance aside, are not a problem.

Vacuum Tube R390A Communications Receiver

This was one of the receivers I used in the USN during the 1960s, when I was listening to enemy communications (hint: I was a Russian linguist).

The inside of the R390A was a wonderland of gears, and coils with slug cores that were moved up and down therein by rods a complex cam and gear mechanism..


R390A Inside Top View


R390A Tuning Mechanism

The R-390A was extremely heavy. I cannot provide a precise weight, but I can attest to the weight from my experience. One time in the Indian Ocean (on the John R. Perry, DE1034), we took a serious roll to port (that's left for you landlubbers). Facing starboard, and in front of my R390A, which was mounted in a 19-inch rack, I instinctively (but stupidly) grabbed onto the rack handles to avoid falling over backwards. What I did, however, was pull the receiver out of the rack onto me, evidently stripping the threads in the rack. The resulting scene, with me on the deck, flailing my arms and legs with the R-390A on my chest like a wounded insect, was something to see. Because it was the midwatch, with nobody around, I escaped the laughter of my spook colleagues.

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