On a recent trip, I stopped at my wife’s cousin’s house deep in the country. In a mostly collapsed barn filled with disintegrating furniture, something electronic resting on a beat-up easy chair caught my eye.
This is a story of a nostalgic, useless, but fun project. What we have here is a COSMAC VIP emulator that runs on a single chip (PIC18F4550 MCU) with minimal hardware.
Sarnoff would take radio out of the exclusive province of the transportation industry and embryonic ham radio hobbyists, and put it into every American home. There it would share space with the other appliances that the inventors of the early 20th century were delivering to increasing numbers of consumers. His stubborn pursuit of technology turned his employer, Radio Corp. of America, into a powerhouse in less than a decade. Sarnoff was one of the pioneers of the era of mass communications, transforming America from a nation of local newspapers and pamphleteers into an era where brute technological force allowed a handful of networks of, first, radio stations to flourish, and then television, to create a near-uniform electronic mass media.
