[HN Gopher] 2XL - '70s toy that faked AI with an 8-track [video]
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2XL - '70s toy that faked AI with an 8-track [video]
Author : fortran77
Score : 93 points
Date : 2022-07-09 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| My stepbrother had a 2-XL. He never had any interest in it but I
| loved it. The narrator's voice was very un-robotlike but that
| didn't matter. It was interactivity in something other than a
| video game, which was a rarity at that time.
| YesThatTom2 wrote:
| It was one of my favorite toys!
| thecosmicfrog wrote:
| We had the second-generation of 2-XL growing up. That version was
| made by Tiger and used cassettes. There was something mesmerising
| about it, even though I knew even as a child it was using some
| sort of "trickery" that I couldn't quite understand.
| LaputanMachine wrote:
| We had this one too, the one with the blue head. I always
| wondered how it worked, as cassettes only had two different
| sides.
|
| Watching this video, I noticed that they must've used the left
| and right channels on either side for a total of four mono
| channels.
|
| Unfortunately I never tried to play the cassette in a normal
| cassette player.
| 0x20cowboy wrote:
| Four track cassette recorders work this way as well. Made
| many band demo albums with one.
| iamjackg wrote:
| I had a friend lend hers to me when I was a kid, and I did in
| fact try it in a cassette player! I even tried to make my own
| cassette, but I soon realized that I couldn't because... All
| 4 tracks had to be recorded in the same direction.
|
| 2-XL used the left and right stereo tracks of each "side" of
| the tape to store four total synchronized audio tracks, but
| all in the same direction of play. If you listened to "side
| A" on a normal cassette player, you'd hear two tracks: one on
| the left and one on the right. If you listened to "side B"
| you'd hear the other two tracks, but played backwards.
| [deleted]
| bketelsen wrote:
| I had one! it was awesome, I used it all the time to play music
| too because it was a regular 8 track player.
| Pakdef wrote:
| What does it help spraying/cleaning the solder joints?
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=amuRIydCoJk&t=6m07s
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| He's actually spraying the manually adjustable potentiometer
| (audio volume control pot) intending for the contact lubricant
| to get inside its moving parts and condition the electrical
| "wiper" inside the pot for the precise reason that it is an
| unsoldered circuit connection and subject to unreliable contact
| from either or both of disuse or overuse.
|
| When an analog volume control responds unevenly or makes static
| when adjusted, try technician-in-a-can, no soldering usually
| involved.
| elromulous wrote:
| I love this. But the title is sensationalized, classic YouTube
| content creator. If it's faking anything, it's faking simple
| logic.
| ev1 wrote:
| I watch Techmoan a lot and I rarely if ever think clickbait,
| they are almost all straightforward. It was apparently
| advertised as smart, having a personality, etc
| lupire wrote:
| mikey_p wrote:
| The way Youtube works these days, creators pretty much have to
| have _something_ to hook people or else their videos gain
| popularity too slowly and are quickly pushed out of view. It
| sucks, and some channels are worse than others, but it 's a
| consequence of how human brains work and the Youtube ranking
| algorithms.
| Veen wrote:
| So is a lot of the stuff marketed as machine learning or AI.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| With an input/outpt data approach that was limited enough,
| there was the Magic 8 Ball.
|
| https://magic-8ball.com/magic-8-ball-answers/
|
| No learning actually necessary for an MVP, certainly not AI
| but there will always be people who want to believe in some
| fairly thin smoke & mirrors.
| lupire wrote:
| classichasclass wrote:
| One of my favourite artifacts is my Star Wars original soundtrack
| on 8-track ("20th Century Tapes (P) 1977 20th century Records"
| TW8-2-541). It's just a fun bit to have on the shelf. Picked it
| up at a garage sale.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| They had me at Star Wars and Other Galactic Funk.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5Rextg2Nyc
|
| (I'm bistellar: I love both Star Wars AND Star Trek!)
| gabereiser wrote:
| Star Wars is just another Galaxy in the mirror universe.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| There's even a Disco Cow Girls Star Wars Mirror Universe!
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0PLHZhvg4Y
| technothrasher wrote:
| Reminds me of the similarly simple toy I had for the 1981 board
| game "DarkTower". It was a plastic tower with a few light bulbs
| and some buttons that you pressed at various times during your
| turn to encounter adversaries and fight battles. It took my young
| mind a while to figure out that it didn't actually know where you
| were on the board or even in the game and was just some very
| simple logic.
| telesilla wrote:
| I am of the age of these kinds of devices and I don't think, A.I.
| was really a concept in how it is these days. I remember robot
| after robot in popular sci fi but outside of the Asimov stories
| my Dad read, I don't remember thinking about robots as
| intelligent in the way we think of A.I. now, as being
| autonomously able to think without being specifically programmed.
| I think I thought they were kind of clever logic.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| You must have been just a little too young to have seen 2001
| and been caught up in those 60's days of sci-fi. HAL-9000 was a
| big deal and set the tone for expectations of AI with fully
| conversational, human-like behavior.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| In the 70s/80s there were a lot of intelligent robot characters
| in popular fiction. Metal Mickey, Little Wonder, robot in Lost
| in Space, K9, Twiggy from Buck Rogers, Muffit from Battlestar
| Galactica, the ship in Flight of the Navigator, Transformers
| (sort of), T-bob (M.A.S.K), tons more I'm sure. It was very
| common for a squad to have an intelligent robot in, or a kid-
| hero to have an intelligent robot sidekick.
| technothrasher wrote:
| The 1920 play that literally introduced the word "robot", Karel
| Capek's "R.U.R.", featured fully autonomous AI robots.
| Izkata wrote:
| AI is an unattainable goal, not because we'll never create it,
| but because "what is AI" changes over time as we figure out how
| to do things, and give them their own name. Decision trees,
| machine learning, deep learning - each of these was "AI" at
| some point, but now that we can do them the magic is gone and
| "AI" has become more distant than it was before.
|
| (Heavily paraphrased from a longer post I read years and years
| ago, no idea where)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| To answer "What is AI?" you first have to answer "What is I?"
|
| Check out the Apple ][ at the Dolphin Research Center in
| 1982, and Ron Reisman's thoughts about dolphin intelligence:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWHCTNztnwQ&t=392s
|
| "It's gotten to the point that I never say anything about
| intelligence in general. I don't know what it means any more.
| I used to. But then I started trying to test it. And if you
| think about it for a while, you don't know what it is." -Ron
| Reisman
| adastra22 wrote:
| What do you suppose AI is if not "clever logic?"
| int_19h wrote:
| There were plenty of "thinking robots" in Sci-Fi of that era.
| Asimov aside, one example that immediately comes to my mind is
| Mike the computer in "Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and the
| titular villains in Saberhagen's "Berserkers" series; both are
| from 1960s.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Jonny 5 is alive!
|
| A decade later but you are right there was plenty of AI back
| then.
|
| I'm sorry Dave...
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I love techmoan
| anotherevan wrote:
| About 15 years ago I came across a cache of WAV files that were
| clips of 2XL talking and various sound effects, which I quickly
| archived. Playing them then, and again just now brings up a lot
| of nostalgia.
|
| I should play a few of them out through the Google Home to scare
| the hell out of the kids.
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(page generated 2022-07-09 23:00 UTC)