Could be for attaching a camera to capture the CRT images.

But we had like a in and out times and you could set your times and cut and fade and it was all manual It wasn’t on a computer at all It was a big huge sweet with a manual controller in front of you and you would set the times and it would then cruise through once you got it exactly where you wanted it and got maybe some if there were audio taken separately you’d have to sync their lips.

It took quite a bit of work to edit a newsworthy piece of video and I was doing it as a teenager. I had already worked at PBS the public broadcasting service in our local area and for them I was in a dark room I did photographs and was on the yearbook photograph I was a photographer for the yearbook They sent me to photojournalism camp instead of bandcamp at Ball State University which is really good for that. But they sent us out with a professional photographer everyday and he would give us some subject matter to seek out and then he would critique our negatives and send us back out with a new role.

That’s really cool it’s interesting to see that I have a teckonics/sony 323 oscilloscope that I’m rehabbing but it’s absolutely spotless as it was maintained by the Swiss military. I picked it up for only 20 francs at the Swiss military surplus shop. We have a real big warehouse version right near where I live in this capital city of Bern.

It’s so well maintained and spotless The only things that are worn out are the d sized nickel academy on batteries which I’m not sure they were even using but the interior there’s not a bit of dust in it and maybe I should check the caps but I’m wondering if it’ll just work right off the bat???

The guy who sold it to me was insistent that I take this special piece which was a clear cover for the cathode ray tube window which is quite small given the tube is very large and long I think it’s a shield for some radiation.

Are you now splitting hairs too?

My first job was in the emi research labs making an electrostatic videcon camera tube. These were uses to make small cameras which were used for pipe inspection since they did not require the magnetic coils of magnetic videcons. They were only ever made in small quantities, maybe a hundred a year s were kept for specialist applications. I still have a couple made on my shelf.

Fun factoid:
When the Manchester computer was being designed, a significant issue was how to provide it with memory. The two solutions they came up with was Williams tubes, and acoustic delay lines.

However when Alan Turing was working at Bletchley park during the war he shared the hut he was working in with a guy who was researching electromagnetism – specifically he was trying to find a material with low remanence – i.e. something you could electromagnetise, but wouldn’t retain residual magnetism afterwards.

In later years magnetic memory was widely used in computers, but it seems the idea never occurred to Turing at the time.

it usually starts with a diagram of a light path with a couple of bean splitters and a set of filters

I’d be surprised to find any beans, split or whole, inside a video camera…