Retrotechtacular: Mr. Wizard Jams With IBM

You may not remember [Mr. Wizard], but he was a staple of nerd kids over a few decades, teaching science to kids via the magic of television. The Computer History Archives Project hasa partially restored film of [Mr. Wizard] showing off sounds and noise on a state-of-the-art (for 1963) Tektronix 504 oscilloscope. He talks about noise and also shows the famous IBM mainframe rendition of the song “Daisy Bell.” You can see the video along with some extras below.

You might recall that the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” paid homage to the IBM computer’s singing debut by having HAL 9000 sing the same song as it is being deactivated. The idea that HAL was IBM “minus one” has been repeatedly denied, but we still remain convinced.

Can you imagine a TV show these days that would teach kids about signal-to-noise ratio or even show them an actual oscilloscope? We suppose that’s what YouTube is for.

At about the 17-minute mark, you can see some enormous walkie-talkies. A far cry from today’s cell phones. At the 27-minute mark, another film shows how engineers at Bell created the song using a mainframe.

We wish there were a modern version of [Mr. Wizard]. Then again, there’s no reasonyou can’t fill in. You might not be on TV, but you can alwaysdrop in on a few classrooms.

15 thoughts on “Retrotechtacular: Mr. Wizard Jams With IBM”

  1. I loved Mr. Wizard! And how often experiments did not go quite right was a great lesson as well. HAL is definitely IBM shifted. What more do you need than the Daisy bit?

  2. HAL was not IBM’s “minus 1.” It was IBM’s “ROT 25.”

  3. At about the 17-minute mark, you can see some enormous walkie-talkies. A far cry from today’s cell phones. At the 27-minute mark, another film shows how engineers at Bell created the song using a mainframe.

    That’s a bit misleading comparison or conclusion, I think.
    It makes technology more dated than it really was!

    These walkie talkies likely had used 11m Citizen band at 27 MHz and had to have “long” antennas in order to be still usable at that frequency.
    We’re talking about 11 metre long radio waves, after all!

    Then there’s the size of the radios, the chassis.
    A lot of it is because of the battery department.
    These 0.5 or 1W AM radios had a couple of AA batreries (8x) or something similar.
    That power was needed to compensate for the poor antenna efficiency.:
    A 5m long dipole antenna would been the right antenna for a low-power radio operating at 27 MHz.

    If these walkie talkies had operated on 2m amateur band at 145 MHz,
    then an very good antenna would have been about merely 47 cm long.
    The power source would have been a single 9v battery, providing 0,150 W.
    Size of the radios would have been a half or a third the size of the radiosin the video.

    Remember: The 145 MHz ham band is not very far from FM broadcast band.
    And spy bugs of the 1960s using that FM band did fit in a small matchbox already!
    Adding receiver functionality was no big deal and turned it into a radio transceiver.
    By using earphones it was no bigger than a cigarette box.

    Cell phones.. They’re low-power, low range transceivers, because there’s a cell phone tower is at every corner. Literally!
    What comparing a vintage walkie-talkie with a cell phone really means is that the outdated technology outperformed the cell phone manifold.

    Such 27 MHz AM walkie talkies with “long” antenna could communicate over a distance of over about 3 km (on flat terrain, through some buildings; otherwise more).
    A classic 2G cell phone at 900 MHz could barely make it a few hundred metres.

  4. That was a great post

  5. inurl:”nist.gov” filetype:PDF best practice

  6. I in used to watch Mr Wizard, Don Herbert. He was a real science teacher not at Azz Clown like Bill Nye the non Science guy

  7. I may have seen this very episode when I was a kid – probably a little too young to really appreciate it back in the mid 1960’s. I do however remember another episode where Mr. Wizard put one of the early integrated circuits under a microscope that was connected to a television camera and talked about the parts contained on it. I think he also mentioned that this was going to really change things in the future as they became more refined. I was always amazed by what appeared to me the expensive equipment – like that scope, digital counters, microscopes among other things that he used during the show – stuff that I had no way of seeing used other than this show – but hey it was network television in it’s heyday and I think it was the only national television show about science for kids that was on the air.

  8. “You may not remember [Mr. Wizard]…”

    Strange way to start an article on HaD. Who here wouldn’t remember Mr. wizard?? It’d be like saying, “You’ve probably never heard of a blue box, but…”

    1. not everyone who reads Hackaday lives in the US

    2. What’s a blue box? I’ve never heard of it. Or Mr Wizard.

    3. srsly “blue box”??? Like the tardis on Dr Who? The first result I found in websearch is a manga: aka アオのハコ, aka Ao no Hako. There’s a film (documentary?) Jewish National Fund had successful fund raising campaign to support the purchase of land in Palestine.
      I think you are referring to the old phreaking hardware to illegally make long distance phone calls. As I’m getting older, I think I’m also little offended of this reminder of my age, maybe you, too?

  9. Dating back to the late neotechnic era when engineers were more widespread than CEOs, and some were paid better than CEOs.

  10. One of my favorites. I love the generic warning at the start. Don’t mess with ping pong balls on mouse traps! You’ll put your eye out, kid!

    What Are Chain Reactions? (Mr. Wizard)
    Official Mr.Wizard’s World Channel

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjEnrB18AL0

  11. I also find it amazing that for “the computer” to “sing the Daisy Bell” all one has to do is tweak some CircuitPython/MicroPython commands inside, say, rp2040 or Xiao ESP32-SAMD21 (both have about the same computing power, one has two cores, one – only one).

    Meaning, simplicity of such task is now at the level of kindergarten kids who can type commands into laptop (or cell phone).

  12. Look carefully at the television. The undistorted reflection off the front shows that it is from the days before toughened CRTs, so a plate of glass was placed in front of the CRT to protect people from an implosion.

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