I recall getting only one of NYC's stations on it. Tuning was difficult.

So time for a story.

In 1983, I still had the one that came out in 1980, or '81. I was eighteen now, and some friends and I were going to meet up with some other friends to go to 'the dam' and launch some simple fireworks for the Fourth of July. Now, fireworks are illegal in the state of N.C., so of course, everyone went to either Virginia or South Carolina to get them. (We were closer to VA.) They had gotten several good ones to launch and we were looking forward to it. Well, we got word that some of the gang had already gone to the dam ahead of us. We were miffed (not really) and decided to play a practical joke on them.

That circuit box could create a siren sound. My car had a CB radio (dating myself here) with a PA horn attached. So, I wired the box up to create the sound, we grabbed a few blinking lights that we could attach to the car, and we drove to the dam. We arrived and saw that they were out there firing off a few things. We waited for a minute, then suddenly floored the car and hit the lights and siren. We blasted onto the dam (which had a path for driving over it. It was an earthen dam, and it was more to create the lake than to dam up the creek) with the lights and siren blaring.

Well, the crew on the dam exploded in every direction. Our buddy Nick actually ran and dove into the lake to try and swim away! The others just scattered... at least for a moment. Then, they saw that the car coming was a 1978 Chevy Nova instead of a modern police cruiser. Of course, we pulled up and fell out of the car laughing. The crew that was on the dam also started laughing. The lone holdout was Nick, who was not happy that he had tried to escape into the water. We were all adamant that this was on him, as no one else tried to do that, or even thought to do that.

I miss those times.

How could they?

I remember "graduating" from tinker toys and lincoln logs to erector sets, Kenner girder and panel, and various and sundry science kits.

They were the mental birthplace of engineers and scientists not simply because we got the kit to work. Some of us wanted to know how and why it worked.

Lots of makers kits available. Way better than radio shack in the day.

AI Means that the author created an outline for the text, and video. (In other words creates the idea for some of the text). The AI Generates the voice and video. In the past the creator would hire a speaker to record the audio that a ghost writer created. Then might hire a ghost graphics person to create the art work for the book..

There's also a whole kinda wild subculture of homemade keyboards that probably mimics the science of the science fair kit pretty closely.

Sure, much of it is plug and play, but kids do learn about computer components and shop for them and sometimes repair their computers when they're not working.

I'm actually not that worried about engineering knowledge among younger kids and teens. The loss of humanities sensibilities is going to be far more dire.

I tracked down all the traces with an ohm meter until I found 1 that had no continuity to the IC. I hit it with my soldering iron. I plugged in everything for the thousandth time. And it worked.. What joy, 4.77mHz Z80 with 16 k or ram. What a powerhouse.

The construction is almost identical. Rather than tubes it has metal-cased transistors, each in a little transistor socket.

It still works too.

Having filaments for a 50C5, 35W4 and 12AT7 in series, straight out of the power line was scary stuff.

There were no self-reported fatalities that I know of. /s

Manual PDF (11MB)
http://www.radiomanual.eu/schemi/Surplus_Radioamateur/Lafayette_KT-135_Explor-air_assembly_manual.pdf

I built a HealthKit, CRT, colour TV that had IIRC a 15KV power supply (and fiddled with it endlessly trying to get it to work properly).

Mine's meant to be battery powered. A wall-wart works just as well.

I still have the Heathkit version of that 3 tube, regenerative, multi-band radio, and, it still works.

As a teen I built several Heathkit and Lafayette kits including a colour TV, a couple of hi-fi amps, an oscilloscope, a multimeter and a RF/audio signal generator.

In fact, it was a very late-comer to that type of product. I pre-date the Shack by many years. I started making electronics from kits at the age of 10, in 1955. Knight Kits. Kits from Allied Electronics. Heathkits. There were several companies who sold such things. All had some sort of progressive kit like those Science Fair Kits from Radio Shack, as well.

That is not to diminish the value of Radio Shack in its early years, but it didn't start that line of products. It just started retail stores that sold electronics supplies.

. . . was created through the theft of others' works in its training.

Is that what you want to support? The more you support these slop channels, the more they will grow.

Here's a prompt for you:

Create a story in which a member of a site that supports a certain set of values turns against those values because of thoughts of cuteness or convenience or whatever justification might be needed to allow such a behavior. Write it as a farce using the style of Neil Simon. Make it have one main character and portray the antagonist as unrealistic. Then, give the characters in the script the traits associated with the three main characters in Catch 22.

So, anyway, there is a lot of creativity needed to fulfill that prompt: none of it comes from 'AI'. The use of AI slop on this site is really no better than abetting theft.

I've got a few similar kits of my own. I was obsessed with radios and telephones when I was a kid. My children were not.

It's possible to start similar discussions on DU without the AI garbage.

I remember in grade school teachers telling us we had to use our own words -- that simply copying stuff out of the encyclopedia was unacceptable. Reposting AI slop is the modern day equivalent of copying stuff out of the encyclopedia.

books to blind people who Apple put out the text to speech apps. And imagine all the Disney cartoon artists that were let go because of computer graphics.

. . . no ideas to transmit. Instead, it is just a pablum of blenderized chunks of probable connections which were stolen from the works of those who originally had the ideas and recorded them as a text or as a painting or as a photograph.

Or course, everyone has the right to ignore this as much as one may choose to do, but that neither improves the accuracy of the faulty analogy nor squares the use of 'AI' from an ethical perspective.

In my opinion, a discussion forum should be based on the exchange of ideas. 'AI' has no such ideas to exchange and posting 'AI' should probably be banned from any discussion forum if a forum wants to continue to be useful for the exchange of ideas.

However, maybe I have you analogy wrong. Do you disagree that it is faulty?

. . . that same channel: