I'm not sure how many of you are into vintage computing in addition to televisions and radio, but the Bendix G15 uses valves and I hope thats close enough.

Anyway...

I stumbled across this series on YouTube about this guy who has loaned and restored a Bendix G15 from 1956, and eventually plays some songs and runs paper tape programs!

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnw98JPyObn3QSIwUz5Iv6NA1x-uGFqAa&si=GYfygZLaC8aChZMW

He does other cool projects, including making his own valve computer!

Hi Oli, on this site in the 'special projects' section I mention the hobby computers I was involved with in the 1980's
Have a look at 'Keeping the DREAM alive'.
Not quite vintage, and no valves involved sadly
Great for nostalgia, like the 'microbee', DS system 80 and so on.
At that time part of my day job involved manufacturing 208v 3 phase 60 cycle power supplies for Honeywell and other systems..
I had a close up view of a lot of main frame systems, just as an electrcian.
It was all just work to do and I never got involved with the actual computers themselves.
Cheers, Fred.

Somewhere there is an interesting article on, I think IBM, modifying 6BE6 for computing.

First computer bit I repaired was a blown up PSU in an early IBM. With 200V diodes in it I wondered how it lasted as long as it did.

First hands on was a factory mainframe. Then the AG college has ones with no HDD. Things changed rapidly from them.

Thanks for that Oli!

I just watched the whole story. Amazing!
Recommended even if you didn't previously think you'd be interested in REALLY vintage computing!
Getting strange and unusual hardware to do amazing things.