2XL - The ‘70s toy that faked A.I. with an 8-Track

Does this guy here look familiar? I don't like this cut, if he does it, if you remember one of these from your childhood, you might be a similar age to me. 78, that's when this came out in 1978. This is 2xl, an edutainment toy, hence the name 2xl. comes from it's supposed to help you excel in your knowledge it's not really a robot it looks like one its brain is an eight

track

cartridge not just one although there are a ton of different titles available for this a surprising number in fact and Solo was in the market in its original form for a few years, from the late 70s to the 80s, although it was sold all over the world and is still fondly remembered by many people today.

Now, of course, I wanted to prove it to him. but the first thing I had to do was get one working and my first hurdle was finding the right power supply. The 2xl does not run on batteries and mine was missing its DC adapter and is complicated by the fact that it uses a power connector which is most commonly used as a microphone or headphone jack and I don't know what voltage it needs now, fortunately, there is an old 2xl fansite that confirms it uses a 9 volt adapter and although i have plenty of multi voltage adapters at home.

With numerous different connectors, the only plug that none of them came with was a 3.5 millimeter connector, but after a bit of searching online I managed to find this. It's designed to power multiple pedalboards, but it's also exactly what's needed to bring the 2xl back to life. So now I have the power, but it's best if I don't try this with any of their proper cartridges yet as the pressure pads on all of them have disintegrated, so for your first test I'm just going to use it with a normal cartridge . 8

track

music car and I already know this one sounds good on other machines, in fact it is one of the fancier cars that use metal sperm pads, so here it goes well, the music sounds good, but the playback head just no. when responding to any button press it appears to be stuck in its lowest position so it can only play program four.

Taking a look inside also reveals that the plastic bracket surrounding the playback head is broken at the top, so even if I manage to move it correctly, accurate head alignment will be an issue, so maybe this isn't the case. the droid I'm looking for. Fortunately, there are two. Yes, now I know. I bought this second one because it came with some cars and it was actually right behind the. carts, but I thought it might be useful to have a spare one and it turns out that it was correct anyway, let's try this one, so the good news here is that the head mechanism works correctly when I can choose any of the four tracks.

However, the bad news is that we have a very shaky sound and there is also annoying knocking. I can see that the head clamp is intact, so overall this seems like the better candidate of the two to try to get working properly. There are a lot of screws on this, we have three here, three up there, three up there, two up, another two down here, so this might take some time while I do this. I'll just mention that I remember these. Being in the UK, although I didn't really understand what was going on with them at the time, I was quite young and I saw a robot that didn't seem to move or do anything and I never saw a demo, so I was out.

I'm not too interested in them, well those are all the screws, they used four different sizes, let's see if we can separate these two halves now, of course there is a speaker on the back, so it will connect to the front, here we go . I don't know if you can see that it's hard to focus on, but it's tenacion or tanishin, the company behind the cheap cassette mechanisms, I mean, the company behind them, although of course nowadays they are being remanufactured by others companies at an even lower price. standard than the original ones, but yes, it is difficult to split it into two pieces.

Well, what I have to do is take this cartridge mechanism and pull it towards the back of the case. Now those three screws that I took out before they were fastened. it's this way, so it should actually slide out now, but it just doesn't want to, it's stuck quickly, aha, here we go, let's talk about the torch in my mouth, okay, we can see this better even if we just take the speaker . back, it just makes it easier to deal with, yeah it looks like some tape has been wrapped around the winch there and I have to assume that's not a good idea so we need to clean it up, let's see if it sounds better without that on the old days, that was it, it was just a piece of tape that was wrapped around the keystone and of course that didn't pull the tape properly when you put the cartridge in there, but it also made a horrible thump. it rattles as it spins and it's fine so it's just a matter of cleaning all the contacts now and putting a little grease on the parts that need grease and you can put them back together again so this is really the heart of the 2xl. section here because unlike a normal 8-track 2xl, we can jump to a specific program because we have our four buttons on the front here, so we can go directly from program 1 to program four on a normal eight-track system that you would be pressing.

Pressing the button a few times would move sequentially through the programs, but here we could go to any of the four programs by simply pressing a button, so right now we're on program one, that's the head versus the cartridge and if I press program four. it falls to the end of the tape and again rises to the top until the end program two the mechanism reminds me a bit of a mechanical telephone exchange and it doesn't sound very different from that either, I suspect it is based on fairly similar principles in the sense of that I press one button on the front and then convert it internally to what are effectively multiple button presses.

Now the belt on this one is fine, there is absolutely no need to change it, it is perfectly capable of doing so. your job, the next thing we need to do is fix those cartridges, so let's put them back together and get started on that. I'll just show you the cartridges that came with the machines I purchased. I have a total of six here in the Guinness Book of Records fairy tale quiz science fiction science fiction 2 nostalgia of the 50s and 60s and cavalcade of superheroes and comics interesting this nostalgia of the 50s and 60s shows that they have quite a catalog varied on this keep in mind you would have a child with this in the late 1970s, they might have their age in the single digits and they certainly wouldn't remember the 1950s so that's something parents can play with too on the bottom.

Note that it says that to use this program in Excel, the buttons must be relabeled with the card that is attached, of course I don't have the card anymore, but you can see here a is true b is false c is yes and d is no because in the machine the standard card has a different layout than they do the same Same goes for sci-fi too so yes ideally it would have the cards to go with them but it doesn't matter I'm sure we can play them without it now need to be fixed, so let's start with this one.

And fast forward to now eight track cartridges are held together in several different ways. I can see these use plastic tabs, unfortunately they can come apart, although you do have to be careful with these because sometimes they can break, so you might just take a couple of minutes, okay so this is what's left of the sponge, we have the plastic backing piece here that it was glued on, that's the rest of the glue there, a sponge and on the outside of that sponge was this piece. of plastic that the tape slides on so it survives, it's just a sponge in the middle that's gone.

Now we need to clean this piece of plastic and I'm going to put some of my usual dust excluders on that, it's not a normal power excluder. Every time I show this, some people say you can use any old material, but I don't exactly see this is a little bit different because we have a layer of shiny plastic here that's like that material over there, so we have the sponge in the middle. , we have the adhesive on the back and then the tape slides over the top. That's the important thing if you have something that's just the middle part, just the spongy part that the tape would grab onto.

So yeah, make sure you have something else with that sliding surface there anyway, you need to clean this up, so I'm just going to use a paint scraper. Now you can just flip it over, but sometimes you have a hard time putting them back into the machine if Sorry, the glue is back in the cartridge, if the glue is still here it's okay, so I just cut a piece of this off , it doesn't have to match perfectly yet, let me put it there and actually, that's not bad, pretty close now to each other. What I need to do is cut a section in the middle because there's a little peg in here and it goes on either side of there and that should do it so put it back together now making sure you don't catch the tape anywhere on this, there's no missing five less.

I've changed my technique a little. I've started using two separate blocks of this stuff, it just means it's a little more stretchy, yeah I think it's a little better as I move up. I also started using a little isopropyl alcohol on this glue because it was still quite sticky and that seems to release it a little bit and creates a cleaner finish once it's scraped off, they're all set, even if that's not the case. It won't take long, everything is ready to play, so let's go for this sci-fi show whose show has moon base alpha. I will give you three options: the program a Star Trek b space 1999 or cu ufo, please answer b or c.

Now apparently you're a real sci-fi fan because you're right, Space 1999 had an alpha version based on the Moon. If you remember, there was a huge explosion that pushed the Moon out of Earth's orbit. Now I'm getting tired, so this will be your last question. Since you're obviously pretty smart and answered this space 1999 question correctly, here's a harder science fiction question. David Bruce Way is a doctor on television, but sometimes he becomes something else. What other character does David Bruce Batter become? I'll give you three. options a spider-man b scalpel man o c incredible hulk please answer b or c now okay let's choose the wrong one this time we will choose spider-man actually we will choose the second scalpel mod we will leave it on b you answered b and this is not correct in this case particular, however, I'll give you another chance to be right, so press b or c now, okay, this time we're going for Spiderman, although even though I gave you two chances, you're not. correct you answered spider-man and the correct answer was c the incredible hulk I gave you two chances because I don't want to anger the incredible hulk we know what happens in that case we don't thank you for turning me on I'm 2xl and this program will confront my electronic brain with its unit of biological thought in the area of ​​nostalgia.

Remember to choose answers only after you say the word now yes or no. The singing host of the Chevrolet show was Connie Stevens. Is this the exact answer? yes or no, I now detect a higher biological unit in my presence, you have answered correctly, in fact the dinosaur was the singing host of the Chevrolet show, you are right, 2xl was based on a very simple idea, an existing technology that was used intelligently to do Do you think this device was perhaps smarter or more sophisticated than it was? Everything was based on the 8-track cartridge. These have been on the market since the mid 1960s in the US and by the time 2xl came onto the scene in the US in the late 1970s the mechanisms to play them had become so cheap that they could form the heart of a children's toy.

However, if you're not familiar with the 8-track cartridge, I just want to show you a snippet of a video I recorded a while ago. explains how they work, so here we go, an 8 track cartridge is a continuous tape loop, if an album is 40 minutes long, it will have a 10 minute loop or so, which goes around and around, how does 10 minutes fit into 40 minutes ? worth music, it divides it into four programs now, when the tape reaches the end, it has a metal layer that drops the playback head to continue with the next program and similarly, until the end of the cartridge, the head The tape looks like this, we have a left channel and a right channel.

If we want to play the first program, it goes to the top of the tape and plays tracks one and five together to produce stereo sound and then when it goes down to the next program it goes to tracks two and six, the next program, the track three and seven, and the next four and eight, and that's how an eight-track cartridge works. Now the cartridges for the 2xl are the same type of cartridge, it's just a full program audio tape. Again, but the audio has been structured andorganized very cleverly in such a way that it allows the user to follow a branching narrative path as they jump between the four individual programs.

I will give you questions 15 and 16 together. I will make 16. easier if you get 15 wrong and I will make 16 harder if you get 50 right, but in any case I will give you two chances with 16 if you need it, okay, let's go to question 15, hold on to your hat, don herbert interpreted what character on tv get smart o b mr wizard answer a o b now good button you're right damn herbert he played mr wizard on tv but now as i promised since you got 15 right i'll have to do 16 fighters for you now We may have noticed when we took a look inside this previously that it uses a standard stereo playback head and that's despite the fact that it doesn't really need stereo to perform its function and only has a mono speaker on the back for the output, there is no headphone jack here, but again it makes a lot of sense for them to use a standard off-the-shelf component like that because it will be tested and used in several different eight-track cartridge players and, most importantly, it would be cheaper So having something made specifically for this and using that stereo component allows us to have the facility to play any normal eight-track music cartridge and you would hear what was on the left and right stereo channels, even if you were just listening through one speaker. , any eight track cartridge player like this has the ability to move between those four programs and that's all you need to be able to play one of these two xl cartridges, you just have to remember which number relates to which option, for example, four is no and two is yes, so yes, with any eight track cartridge.

If you have some 2XL carts you can play with game section number two, this section is about bionic people, question number eight, what organization do Jamie Summers and Steve Austin belong to? or you could say work, here are your three options. the f b i b o s i o c c i o please answer b o c now, click the cookie and pop, you are right, you have answered b-o-s-i, you may be interested to know that o-s-i means the office of scientific information, you have answered b and you are right now in the past i presented another device that used eight-track cartridges for their programs and that was the mb omni entertainment system.

Although it used them in a more sophisticated way than the 2xl, it still used the same stereo head arrangement, but one of those heads was for audio playback. the other was for data, effectively it was a reprogrammable computer now, when you hear data type noises coming from the 2xl, beeps and boops and good stuff, in this case, those are just sound effects, they're just there for a bit of fill-in Sometimes some of them you will even recognize from various sound effects libraries and others appear to have been captured from suitable computer components such as modems. These sound effects are there for a couple of reasons, as the tape keeps moving all the time and they provide a delay. in which a person has the opportunity to press a button, but also when they were putting together these programs, if the audio or one of the tracks of one of the programs did not fit the length of the others, we could fill it with a certain amount of sound effects so that when the next option comes up, they all match perfectly, but the scripts in these have been very cleverly thought out to keep things matching across all of those entire programs, no matter which of the options you've chosen it probably takes your brain an hour to cook rice minute you are wrong you entered c but the correct answer was d sorry for the way 2xl's voice was provided by the inventor of the device which is michael j freeman you are right on the menu now this one particular cartridge is divided into two, a and b, one set of questions, and c and d are another and at any point you can just jump in, of course you don't have to wait for it to say every once in a while you can hear what's going on. elsewhere in the cartridge, yeah, we'll just let you know that the correct answer is five.

Truman Eisenhower started in 1969. You answered yes, but this is unfortunate because the fact of the matter is that I think it's easier to hear what's going on under each of the options on a cartridge at the same time if we take a look at the audio files on a computer so let's do this right so we're looking at the contents of the cartridge now the four individual programs let's just press play and see what we can hear thanks for turning me on. I prefer to be on and off. I'm all about standing out and this show is right, as you can see here everyone is playing the same thing at the same time, let's move on. to the first question number one, in which city does Batman fight crime?

I'll give you three options and I would certainly appreciate it if you used a b or c, but to answer it now note that the audio for the question was on all four channels, so no matter what button you pressed on the front of the device, you were going to hear that question , let's move on, let's see what the question is: Does Batman fight crime in a metropolis b New York or does c have it? Please choose your a b or c now okay so we are in the sound effects section there and now we are going to get the answers let's listen to what it says correctly so you can listen there we have different answers on different channels so let's go over To hear what they are, let's start from the top, so this is the q button.

This is if we hadn't pressed b or c since q was pressed, I'll assume there is some confusion in the peanut gallery. the correct answer to this question was to see gotham city is where batman fights crime okay, let's move on to the next one, this would be the button a great ghost of Caesar, you have chosen a metropolis and this is not the correct answer batman fights crime crime in gotham city she would have been the correct answer, okay, let's try the b button santa big apple, you answered b new york and you are not right batman fights crime in gotham city although it is true that a new york could use a batman this is 1978 or is it about new york so slightly different but let's listen to this one as alfred the butler would say you're right my personal ship and alfred would be right you've answered watch gotham city and you're right ok , so we have moved on from the question. sound effect the answer now let's see how they branch again okay we have a mix of things so let's start again from the top so again this is the questions button since you got confused with the last question about Batman here.

There is another question for you, what was the name of the car that Batman used to fight crime? I'll even give you three options. Your answer is a the datsun b the batmobile or c the road monster. Please answer b or c now so remember the answer is b for the first question let's see what they are since you didn't do very well on this question about batman here is an easier question about batman what was the name of batman's assistant even I will give you three options what is his name a roger b robin or c Jimmy please choose a b or c now the answer to that one is also b so let's move on to the next one.

Here's another question about Batman and since you missed the last one I'll make this an easy question: what is Batman's name when it's not fighting crime I'll even give you three options is your answer to stuart bendo b bruce wayne o c dick wayne please answer b o c now okay so that's also b i think you can guess what will happen next Well since you've done so well on this Batman question, here's a harder question, which Is the name of Robin, Batman's assistant, when he is not fighting crime? Here are three options: Warren Bendor, Dick Grayson or C, Tom Ward, please answer b or c.

Well, we have four different questions under the four different buttons, but the answer to all of them is b. Now, of course, when we get to this answer section here we can't go into detail about what the answer is. Just say if you were right or not, but I won't give you the correct answer like he did before, so let's listen to that now again, everyone is different, of course, let's choose the top one since q is pressed. I will do that. Suppose you got confused, the correct answer to this particular question was b b, right, let's move on to the next one, you answered a, but the correct answer was b, so you are not correct, okay, let's go to the correct answer, you probably used the bat computer to get the correct answer because you answered b and b turns out to be the correct answer to this question, good job and finally the last one, you could have used the bat computer to get the correct answer because you are not right, the answer correct was b and unfortunately you've chosen c, so you get the idea that it's a bit like one of those choose your own adventure books where you're allowed some flexibility with the action you take next by turning to a certain page and then a certain point, it will try to take you back to the main story again, hit the question button now, so while the 2xl presents a convincing illusion of sophistication, it's actually just a trick that tricks you into thinking there's more going on than the ones there are. you're actually just listening to an analogue audio tape, it doesn't memorize any sheet music, there's no data processing here, but it's really quite clever what they achieved with such limited resources and I really appreciate the fact that they have a recording there for each eventuality on all channels if, for example, you don't press the buttons you're supposed to press, then make sure there's something there for the machine to say in response to that. and so even though this is just a 21 minute tape loop, there's still some kind of replay value here to get it to play all the different ads on all the different tracks, if you don't mind, reply to b or c now. since q is pressed, I'll assume you got confused, but in this particular case this is not acceptable.

I would like you to try again and choose an answer, so try again, choose a b or c now question 22, while the original 2xl from the 70s died out in the early 1980s it was still a familiar device for a generation older young man with a different design than this one. It was re-released in the 1990s by Tiger Electronics with a version that used compact cassettes instead of eight tracks and yes, I have one of those in storage. maybe I'll get it out one day and we'll take a look at it, but ultimately there's no real need to play with the original hardware because you can play the entire 2xl catalog of all the cartridges and cassettes through a great online emulator and I'll link to that in the video description now on my rose real name was norma gene morton son natalie wood real name is b natasha gordon so it was all 2xl a device built around a very simple system and but a clever idea that managed to create the illusion of something with a degree of sophistication of interactivity that wouldn't actually be possible until many years later, but that's all for now, as always, thanks for watching, bye everyone, bye, this show is over, thank you please. turn me off now so that you