From: Jim Haynes
Subject: Teletype and Radio museums, pioneers, and collections [telecom]

Oh, I've hit the big 84 already, so have been retired for quite a
while now. I still collect info about Teletype Corp., and I'm also
working on a home for my artifacts.

David Monroe in San Antonio has started a museum there called SAMSAT. <www.samsat.org> He was with Datapoint when that company was still
alive. He has an amazing collection of stuff. He was a friend of the
late Bert Prall, the fabulous telephone collector once of Winnetka, IL
who later moved to San Antonio where he died. There was a nice
telephone museum in Houston, but it got shut down when AT&T sold the
building that housed it. David Monroe was connected with that. They
had acquired Bert Prall's collection but I think never got it unpacked
before they went down. Also with Datapoint was the late Vic Poor - I
never met him but we corresponded a lot in the mid 1960s when he was
with Frederick Electronics Corp. He is regarded as the architect of
the Intel 8008 microprocessor,

http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_History/Poor_Victor/102658337.05.01.pdfthough

... [but] they didn't use it in the Datapoint product because Intel
wasn't convinced there was a future for that kind of chips. So the
Datapoint terminal was built out of ordinary ICs.

[Here's a] book: Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented
the Personal Computer Revolution, by Lamont Wood

Vic was into amateur radioteletype, like me, and some colleagues were
Irv Hoff and Keith Petersen. Vic was turning out commercial products
at Frederick Electronics and the others were working on amateur
equipment. I have a friend James O'Neal from my home town who lives
in the D.C. area. He's retired from being the engineering head of the
video equivalent of Voice of America. Now he edits the IEEE Broadcast
group magazine, writes for other things such as the RadioWorld
periodical. <http://www.radioworld.com> Lots of interesting stuff he
has done on the history of broadcasting. RadioWorld doesn't have a
good search facility, but if you can find the heading Roots of Radio
it will lead to those articles. Or google for "radioworld O'Neal." It
was James who found the two-volume Western Union History of Technical
Progress 1935-1945 book set at a yard sale, sort of a forerunner of
Western Union Technical Review, and let me copy and scan it.

[See] http://telecom-digest.org/wutechprogress/

Best,

Jim

--
"Ya can argue all ya wanna, but it's dif'rent than it was."
"No it ain't! No it ain't! But ya gotta know the territory."
Meredith Willson, The Music Man

--
Bill Horne
Telecom Digest Moderator

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