World Power Systems
Stumbled across this page while looking for something else and spent the next hour browsing around. If you are into art, old computers (drum memory and vacuum tubes), and very strange creations that seem to date from the Cold War era but don't quite seem real, check out Tom Jennings website:
World Power Systems
People who have been online before the Internet came into being will recognize that name as one of the chief architects of the FidoNet Computer BBS system.
Fascinating stuff:
Model 23 Trinitite Box
This is was first WPS product. The heart of the device is a tiny diorama, water colors on lead, with a reactor-shielding lead glass window, revealing a view, north and east, from the stolen McDonald Ranch, towards the Oscura Mountains, not quite north enough to encompass the Trinity Site; the soil and rock in the foreground is a recently-native form of man-made rock called trinitite. It is mildly radioactive (only four times average background radiation at sea level; quite safe within or without its little box). In the sky is the window of a Geiger-Mueller tube; with each disintegration of Cesium-137 within the trinitite a beta particle is emitted; those that reach the G-M tube cause a small spark within the tube, made audible with electronics inside the Model 23. Each same spark, processed by other electronics within, triggers one view of each of the frames on the film strip, projected badly on a tiny viewing screen visible in the viewing hood, after the red start switch is pressed. Some of the front-panel controls affect operation of the device.
Posted by DaveH at January 19, 2005 3:38 PM
