TANDY LIGHT CONTROL (TLC): Remembering the Past - Preserving for the Future
TLC 2.0 (2023)
Serendipity...
The Vintage Computer Festival Southwest 2023 event was held at the University of Texas - Dallas campus. One of the speaking events featured "The Ultimate Tandy Panel", including Tandy alumni Paul Schreiber, Jerry Heep, Rick Thompson, Steve Mosher, and Kathy Paur. Each spoke and shared their own memories of working at Tandy Corporation.
As a follow-up to the Panel, the participants were interviewed in a 1:1 setting. Near the end of Jerry Heep's interview, he mentioned that he'd worked on the Tower Lights automation project.
This got my wheels spinning...
- What happened to the TLC software?
- And, what about the hardware?
As it turns out, Jerry's daughter Nikki still had the original Visual Basic Source Code from 1997, transferred from an original floppy disk over to a USB drive at some point in the past couple of decades. Upon sharing the software with me, I demonstrated that I was able to get it installed and launched on a vintage Windows 98 PC.
This was exciting for all, as Jerry and Nikki hadn't seen the program in decades, and I'd never seen it before this point.
In a somewhat-joking statement, I said to Jerry,
"how cool would it be to have a model of the towers, and see this program running again?"
Apparently, a die-hard engineer loves a challenge.
From Big to Small
Beginning around August 2023, Jerry and I were in constant contact via email and phone, discussing what this project might look like. Jerry worked up some initial block diagrams of the hardware solution. We of course didn't have two 20-story buildings at our disposal, so the design evolved into a schematic for a "Wall Simulator" to communicate with the TLC software.
In Jerry's words...
"THEORY OF OPERATION: The Wall Simulator (WS) takes the place of the LC and the many LCBs. Each WS PCB controls fifty-eight lamp rows. Each lamp row consists of six orange LED lamps. Two WS PCBs are needed to simulate both sides of each tower. Only one tower will be simulated. The master WS PCB is connected to the TLC, using a standard nine pin RS-232 connector. The serial data is transmitted at 9600 baud. The “slave” WS PCB received its serial data from the Master WS PCB."
Let's Build It!
"Let's" is perhaps not the right word here. Jerry did all of the technical effort, including creation of the schematics, sourcing the Bill of Materials, & getting the printed circuit boards manufactured. Once everything was collected, we needed to get it assembled. Not a task that Jerry nor I wanted to tackle.
Thankfully, there's a wonderful company right here in North Texas called TexElec. Kevin Williams, owner, is well-known and highly regarded in the community as the provider of quality parts and service for technical projects, new or old. We reached out, and Kevin responded almost immediately that he'd be happy to support this effort.
This was a key milestone in completion of the project. Using Jerry's design and the expertise of TexElec, the boards were assembled and ready to become the model for the Tandy Towers.
Bringing It All Together
Now that we had the PC Boards assembled and bench tested, it was time to get a physical presentation put together. Using the dimensions of the circuit Boards, I was able to determine an approximate size for each tower, which ended up being about 3 feet tall x 10 inches wide. Inserting the assembled PC Boards allowed the LED array to fit nicely between the tower walls.
Making "The Towers"
The Tandy Towers in Fort Worth had a unique "pyramid" look on the face of each building... the walls featured symmetrical rows that became more narrow as they reached the top of the building. We used that same idea in creating our model.
After quite a bit of cutting, painting and gluing, the result was a model that, while not perfect, does give the look and feel of the Towers... especially once the lights are turned on.
Once the project build was complete, it was time to unveil it. And what better time & place than Vintage Computer Festival Southwest 2024, one year after I'd initially made contact with Jerry and kicked off the idea.
The towers were packed well, taken to our Tandy Showcase exhibit space at UT-Dallas, and reassembled in time for the event that took place June 14th - 17th.