Rise and fall of the wire recorder

The principle of magnetic recording had been first demonstrated in 1898 by Valdemar Poulsen. Roughly half a century later, between 1946 and 1954, magnetic recording had experienced a decade of widespread use with the advent of wire recorders (mainly in the USA) and tape recorders (mainly in Germany) used barely for speech (radio, Dictaphones, etc). Here you get to see and hear in action a 63 year old machine that is in pristine condition, Music recording was still compromised by the distortion and noise inherent in the process of magnetic recording without AC bias.

Have you ever seen a PIC-driven Enigma or a World War 2 Spy Set? In our previous webinar, CryptoMuseum’s Marc Simons and Paul Reuvers showcased and demoed a fair amount of cryptographic equipment, from WW2 Enigma to 1980s private mobile radio, discussing technical details in depth.

The electronics student of today was probably born somewhere in the mid-nineties of the last century. That may sound like a long time ago, but he/she is still much younger than the vacuum tube. Most of those students have probably never seen a tube let alone worked with one. To them tubes are ...