What Is It? for 12/30/2012

I agree, it's a Ridgid drain cleaner, unsure of exact model, it's an older one.

Going by the date, it's way ahead of it's time.

It is Qbert's daddy.

Mommy calls him Rigid.

QBert! Fond memories!

I worked on the Atari version of QBert a looooong time ago.

In the first versions we didn't have enough memory to store all of the musical notes (pitch-values) and so we commandeered a tiny bit of the space used for the video. You could tell which version you had simply by looking at the right end of the last raster line, where you saw a short series of colored dots. That's how the video interpreted the pitch values - as color-palette entries.

Most people never noticed the dots because that part of the video raster on CRT-based TVs was typically scanned slightly beyond the edge of the screen, but you could adjust your TV's vertical knob to bring it into view if you wanted.

When the next-gen ROMs came out, the dots went away because we had a whole two kilobytes more memory to play with. My god, it was like moving into the Vehicle Assembly Building!

Contrast that with the space a completely blank Word 2010 document takes up on your hard drive: 13 k.

Are we getting our money's worth?

There was an excellent TV show recently about one of the earliest computer games. Two Brit dudes had an idea for some sort of 3D game, using some sort of algorithm to max the pathetic amount of memory available. Turned down by the big players, they went to what was then some shack down a dark alley. I'll get back to you on this when the name of the show or the game comes to mind. It involved flying a spaceship thru umpteen different galaxies and doing whatever. Does it ring any bells ? Pure genius of compact coding.

I remember a game we played on DARPA net that linked universities back in the '70's. We linked up on a 300 baud phone modem with a TI portable paper terminal a bit larger than a typewriter and chased Klingons around Uranus.

Not mine! I was too busy smoking europium.

What were they doing around Uranus, anyway?

Not the right link, but it's worth a look just to see Raymond Baxter.

It's an electric snake.

Bricktop nailed it.

Guess I'm always a little too late adding my first comments (time zones?)

Love to get in there a little quicker!!

Fully agree it looks like something from Mr. Roto Ruter. Mine is a hand twisted device, wished I had some motor power behind it!! ERR! ERR!

It's a drain snake for clearing clogged drains.

RotoRooter--

So it's not a free energy device, then? That's so disappointing...

Hemoroids

It's a drain auger. Not too difficult this time. Is it some kind of special unit? Has the same tip as mine and a very similar frame. Hmm?

Electric sewer snake

I believe it is a device that is used to remove deep seated politicians from hidden places, where they tend to inpede the flow of good ideas.

The fact that it is a drain opening rotary tool is clear, but what is the insulated cable and the copper tubing off the to side (right hand) of the photograph? Are we to infer this is actually a part of the apparatus, or is it just the AC tubing running past in the background? Judging by the ancient vacuum cleaner appearing item on the left, this is in some sort of museum? A proctology museum?

The device on the left is actually a slightly angled view of a Remington Turbo type kerosene heater. The cap is the filler. I actually own that exact unit and have seen that view many times from underneath the car. Or at least a very, very similar model. And that cable line looks very similar to an outdoor air condtioning line that has been kind of messed around with, with the black being the insulation and the copper tubing the high pressure line. But I do have a vivid imagination so I might be way off base.

Thanks for the imagination "wrong with you".

A mechanical device to clean out a length of hollow cylandrical object when the engineer or installer neglected to use pitch of 1/8in/foot.

It's a rigid plumbing snake. Photo via Craigslist.