A Really Retro TV (and a Cyberdeck?)
July 2, 2023
When I saw the TV on Ebay, I knew I had to have it.
When browsing Ebay for an unrelated reason, I found a listing for a TV, claiming to be from JCPenney in 1978. I did some more research and discovered the model was the Panasonic TR-5000A, a 3-in-1 TV, radio, and audio cassette player! It has a 5in (13cm) black and white CRT tube, so small and cute! It can be powered using AC, 12 volt DC, or 9 D Cell batteries. Evidently, in Japan these units were known as ラテカセ (ratekase), a combination of the English words radio, television, and cassette.
It was listed as "Working", and seemed to have very little wrong with it, besides the front panel being ripped off and it looked as though it were in dire need of cleaning. When it arrived, I immediately turned it on to see if all the parts worked, and it totally did! The TV, radio, and Cassette deck all worked fine. After taking it all the way apart to do some cleaning (be careful when taking apart CRT devices, they can seriously injure you!), I spent some more time researching and considering how I could use the various features. I found a suitable power supply, as the one that it had come with was not powerful enough to run the unit. After some research, I discovered that when it was new, the Japanese model of this unit cost somewhere around ¥69,800 (≈$274 US). Adjusted for inflation, that's around ¥111,455 (≈$771 US). Not a cheap machine!
Anyway, I knew from the beginning that I wanted to turn it into something of a Cyberdeck, so I acquired the necessary items to hook a Raspberry Pi to it as a video/audio output, and got to work!
Working on the TV
And what did I get at the end of it? Well, for one, text is really hard to read on a CRT that small, which is also not designed for displaying text. However, I think it's probably the coolest computer I own now, as it looks like something straight out of Half Life with all its dials and knobs. The physical form factor itself is something to be interested in, something that really could have only come out of the era it was produced in, where the consumer interest was entirely on those 3 formats that it was specifially designed for! To wrap this up, here are some images of the screen and finished "Cyberdeck" (if you could call it that, the keyboard does not fit at all!).
Final image gallery
