It's so cool to see someone actually try to build their silly daydream.
When I was about 12, in the early 1980's when consumer VCR's were hot "new" tech, I imagined building a giant purely mechanical (except for I/O) VCR. The thing I imagined was huge - it was about 50ft wide x 100ft long x 50ft tall and would have used tape about 6 feet wide. The size was apparently due to the limitations of mechanical modulation of permanent magnets used to record and the bandwidth required to record video. Don't ask me how playback was supposed to work with passive magnets but I think the idea was very sensitive paramagnetic heads amplified mechanically by some absurd degree. There was lots of mechanical differential signal processing in this idea.
This wasn't some passing daydream. Over at least six months I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of figuring out if it was even possible to build though I never had any intentions of actually building it. What I was obsessed with is figuring out how or if you could build such an outrageously impractical device.
When I was about 12, in the early 1980's when consumer VCR's were hot "new" tech, I imagined building a giant purely mechanical (except for I/O) VCR. The thing I imagined was huge - it was about 50ft wide x 100ft long x 50ft tall and would have used tape about 6 feet wide. The size was apparently due to the limitations of mechanical modulation of permanent magnets used to record and the bandwidth required to record video. Don't ask me how playback was supposed to work with passive magnets but I think the idea was very sensitive paramagnetic heads amplified mechanically by some absurd degree. There was lots of mechanical differential signal processing in this idea.
This wasn't some passing daydream. Over at least six months I became increasingly obsessed with the idea of figuring out if it was even possible to build though I never had any intentions of actually building it. What I was obsessed with is figuring out how or if you could build such an outrageously impractical device.