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Where can I get some dummy/discarded panels? I want to replace all the walls in my room with them, and wire up some LED's to blink randomly/illuminate when I press the buttons.

Well...a couple places I'd look for starters would be Fair Radio Sales:

http://www.fairradio.com/

They carry a wide range of varied military and commercial electronics.

Also might try Uncle Sams' own surplus sales through the DRMS (Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service):

http://www.drms.dla.mil/

Or, hey...you could actually get something that actually works plus looks cool as heck. How about an IMSAI computer ala 1975? Here's an updated but still vintage-appearing IMSAI (Series 2)..plus, who wouldn't want the computer that had a brief spot in the movie "Wargames"? (Check the pic at the bottom.) How geek-cool is that???

http://www.retrothing.com/2005/08/the_imsai_serie. html

Hey, wait!!! There's the answer right there!! All they need is to buy a few of these puppies, and problem solved!! :P

Cheers!

Strat

Other than jumping a nice arc the device built and tested for Martin (the stupid gangly dork) Sargent's show was pathetic. It would just piss someone off. It's not a threat just a good way to get your shit pounded. Now Seeing "the Swish" threaten Martin with it was good.

The only reason I even saw this show was everything else that was on sucked worse, otherwise "Unscrewed" is a waste of time. As I am recovering from major surgery and have a catheter up my penis for the last 2 weeks the pain of this "Unscrewed" show seemed minor. On the plus side they got all the cancer. Hoping I don't have to watch any more "Unscrewed" in the next four weeks of recovery.

Bottom line you can build a better "taser" with a Fair Radio Sales catalog. Or even better by the real thing for 20 bucks at the local (insert ethinic group name here) corner market. The thing they built was a "tickler" many of us built in grade school or Jr. High.

Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio has been dishing the surplus goodies like hand-crank military surplus field telephones, vacuum tubes and, yes, 10 kV capacitors for decades. A real treasure trove.

Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio has been dishing the surplus goodies like hand-crank military surplus field telephones, vacuum tubes and, yes, 10 kV capacitors for decades. A real treasure trove.

Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio has been dishing the surplus goodies like hand-crank military surplus field telephones, vacuum tubes and, yes, 10 kV capacitors for decades. A real treasure trove.

Fair Radio Sales in Lima, Ohio has been dishing the surplus goodies like hand-crank military surplus field telephones, vacuum tubes and, yes, 10 kV capacitors for decades. A real treasure trove.

52 years old... If they restore it to actual operational status I'll bet they don't run it for very long at a time. Spare tubes and such are gonna be a bear to find.

Tubes aren't as hard to come by as you might think. Lots of companies are still selling 'em. The biggest of 'em is Antique Electronic Supply in Arizona; a couple of others I can think of off the top of my head are CWest Tubes in Utah and Fair Radio Sales in Ohio. The audiophooles have driven the prices of some types (especially power triodes) through the roof, but many types still sell for just a few dollars each, including (IIRC) the 12A_7 types that boatanchor computers more than likely would've used by the gross. (If they're interested in economizing, they could retrofit the machine to use some of the goofball tube types developed for TV use, which are dirt-cheap...but since they're working with a one-of-a-kind machine, they probably don't want to hack it up too badly.)

In fact, I've heard from some people that it's actually harder to fix old transistor radios than it is to fix similar equipment built with tubes, since early transistors have become scarcer than hens' teeth. Early ICs can be equally hard to come by (some talk came up in comp.sys.apple2 a while back about the feasibility of reproducing the Apple I from schematics, and someone noted that some of the chips used in that machine's design are no longer available.

With all that said, the machine would more than likely be on static display most of the time. They might fire it up for special occasions or just to verify that it still works, but I doubt they'll have it participating in GIMPS 24/7. :-)