Alarm Clocks and ChatGPT

[OrangeGlow]

This isn’t completely nixie related but of all people the folks on this list will most likely understand and appreciate what I have to say.  It is about a recent exchange I had with ChatGPT3. [TL;DR: about history of technology]  

I’ve spent the last couple of years working on a couple of alarm clocks.  One was going to use IV-9's but then Moses came up with his very nice IV-9 kit. I built it even though it had no alarm.

The other alarm clock I wanted to design was based on the thought that the way technology developed there is no such thing as a consumer transistorized alarm clock.  (So, that’s the first point: if I’m wrong about this please stop me now!)  It takes too many parts to make one.  The synchronous motor was well established and made into many inexpensive clocks.  The only change to clocks in the time period I have focused on was a modernization of synchronous motor clocks to use flip numbers instead of a dial. The economics of making a transistorized alarm clock as a consumer product were so bad it was barely given a thought.

And yet the following is an exchange I had with ChatGPT3 while researching alarm clocks:

Me: Has there ever been a transistorized alarm clock (no integrated circuits)? If not why not?

ChatGPT: Yes, transistorized alarm clocks without integrated circuits have existed. Transistor technology predates integrated circuits, and many electronic devices, including alarm clocks, transitioned from vacuum tubes to transistors before the widespread adoption of integrated circuits.

Transistors were developed in the late 1940s, and by the 1950s, they began replacing vacuum tubes in various electronic applications due to their smaller size, lower power consumption, and increased reliability. Transistors were used in alarm clocks to replace the bulky and power-hungry vacuum tubes, making the clocks more compact and energy-efficient.

The transition from transistors to integrated circuits happened later, in the 1960s and 1970s. Integrated circuits provided a further reduction in size and power consumption and allowed for more complex functionality within a single chip. However, during the era of transistorized alarm clocks, integrated circuits were not yet as prevalent or cost-effective as they later became.

In summary, transistorized alarm clocks were common before the widespread adoption of integrated circuits, as transistors offered advantages over vacuum tubes. The progression from transistors to integrated circuits occurred as technology advanced, enabling more features and miniaturization in electronic devices.

Me: Name one commercial transistorized alarm clock?

ChatGPT: One example of a commercial transistorized alarm clock is the "Bulova Transistor Radio Alarm Clock" from the 1960s. Bulova, a well-known watch and clock manufacturer, produced this clock as part of their line of transistorized clocks during the transition from vacuum tubes to transistors. The use of transistors in such clocks during that era was a notable advancement in terms of size, power efficiency, and reliability compared to earlier technologies.

Me: Was there a consumer vacuum tube clock ?

ChatGPT: Yes, consumer vacuum tube clocks were indeed produced, especially in the mid-20th century. Before the widespread adoption of transistors and later integrated circuits, vacuum tubes were a common component in electronic devices, including clocks. These clocks often had the warm glow associated with vacuum tubes and were a part of the technology prevalent during that era.

One example is the Telechron Model 8B03, which was a vacuum tube clock manufactured in the 1950s. Telechron, a well-known clock company, produced various models that incorporated vacuum tubes for timekeeping. These clocks were a representation of the technology available at the time, and they are now considered collector's items due to their vintage nature.

While vacuum tubes were widely used in electronic devices, including radios and televisions, their use in clocks diminished with the advent of transistor technology, which offered advantages such as smaller size, lower power consumption, and improved reliability.


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Perhaps this is a problem with definitions, “Bulovas...line of transistorized clocks ” notwithstanding. But this looks very much like a series of logically erroneous inferences  when it says “the Telechron 8B03 employed vacuum tubes.”  It did not.  But the cabinet looks like a ‘30's tube radio. Therefore it must have used tubes!  Every electronic product progressed sequentially through vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits.

The only vacuum tube clock I’ve ever seen was made by David Forbes from HP counter modules.  Yes, there are wonderful trigger clocks too; please see Graham Marsh.

There have been a couple of kits for transistorized clocks, therefore they are commercial, but I’m still not aware of any alarm clocks.

Previous to this ChatGPT exchange I had useful experiences with ChatGPT but this has undermined all confidence it.

I’d really appreciate any comments you have about ChatGPT’s responses as well as any additional historical facts you might have, especially if I’ve got anything wrong.

Also, I have to say, the Bulova transistor radio alarm clock is pretty sweet. I’ve wanted one for thirty years.

My transistor alarm clock uses 6 NL-5441A’s, so this email is about nixies.

Thanks,

Tom

[David Pye]

ChatGPT is an LLM.

If you ask it to write a legal argument, it will produce something that looks like a legal argument.

It even has references.

However, it was demonstrated that it had invented those references.

It produces something that "looks like" a coherent argument but it just confabulates.

Similar experiences with asking it to write functions to generate CRCs, where it swears blind that its code works when it does not.

Davkd

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[Audrey]

> Previous to this ChatGPT exchange I had useful experiences with ChatGPT but this has undermined all confidence it.

I am glad you had this experience, you should not inherently trust the output of any LLM, they are just as fallible as a human, and they word their output confidently. I have asked it many highly niche questions like that, and it is very rarely able to produce anything short of nonsense, it doesn't seem to be able to say "I don't know".

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[Moses]

Tom,

I'm happy you like the kit! I have since modified the firmware and added an alarm..
https://youtu.be/FIKUV4JOYl0

Add a piezo or a speaker and it beeps and boops like an old video game, brings back old memories for me. You can input customs tunes via RTTTL, the old text based music/note/ringtone format developed by Nokia. 

Firmware 0.92v B2 is the version you need.. check https://www.neonixie.com/IV-9-6D-RR/

ChatGPT.. I don't know, I have enough troubles in life without talking to machines. Life is soup, I am fork.

Regards,
-Moses

[Tom Nolan]

Hi Moses,

Thanks for the update. Good video! Jolly lot of nixie clocks. I think I knew about it just hadn't filtered down to a to-do list.

Tom

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[Tom Nolan]

David Pye and Audry,

I guess I'd never asked difficult questions before but I did get helpful answers, nothing as stunningly wrong.

Tom

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[Dylan Distasio]

Just my two cents working with LLMs a fair amount...They are all prone to hallucinations when they don't know the answer.   With direct access to the LLM, you can reduce this sometimes by lowering the "temperature" parameter.   You may be able to approximate doing this through prompt engineering with the chatbot.   You can firmly instruct it not to make up responses if it doesn't know the answer.   You will also find if you challenge it on a wrong answer, it may either provide a correct one, just apologize and agree with you, or provide another wrong one.   How you phrase prompts can be very important to results received in general.

If you have any ebooks/documents with any related history, you can also upload them to the chatbot to enhance its understanding of a niche area on the fly.  This is what is known as Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), and can greatly reduce hallucinations and deliver accurate info based on the uploaded materials.

FYI, if you are going to upload anything, I would suggest potentially taking a look at Claude2 as last time I checked it has a much larger context window than GPT3 (You may also want to check out GPT4).   The context window determines how many tokens the LLM can pull in to work with from what you've uploaded (which ultimately determines when something is too big for it to ingest).

Alphabet's Gemini 1.5 which will be out shortly increases the context window to 10 million which may be a game changer (as a reference, I believe the current context window on GPT4 is 128,000!

Just for comparison, here are Claude2's results on a similar line of questioning...I'd be interested to hear if anyone can verify the veracity:

ME: You are an expert on the history of electronics going back to the start of the industry. Please answer my questions to the best of your ability, and DO NOT MAKE UP answers if you are unsure of them.

I do not actually have expertise on the history of electronics. As an AI assistant created by Anthropic to be helpful, harmless, and honest, I will not make up or guess answers if I am unsure. If you have questions about the history of electronics, I can try my best to provide factual information, but please understand there may be limits to my knowledge.

ME: Has there ever been a transistorized alarm clock (no integrated circuits)? If not why not?

Yes, there have been transistorized alarm clocks made without integrated circuits.

Transistors started replacing vacuum tubes in consumer electronics like radios and televisions in the 1950s. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, advances in transistor technology made them small, cheap and reliable enough to be used in consumer clock radios and basic alarm clocks.

Some examples of early transitional transistorized alarm clocks from the late 1950s to mid 1960s include:

- General Electric had some of the earliest transistorized clock radios in 1957-1958 using four transistors. They later made basic transistorized alarm clocks without the radio using similar circuitry.

- Sears had a line of "Compact" transistorized alarm clocks in 1959-1963 that contained a small number of individual transistors rather than tubes or integrated circuits.

- Japanese companies like Sanyo, Sony and Toshiba made some of the first mass-produced transistorized alarm clocks for export in the early 1960s.

The circuitry was still relatively simple, using individual transistors wired on circuit boards rather than integrated circuits. But it allowed miniaturization and battery operation compared to tube-based clocks. They were affordable products marking an intermediate step before ICs fully took over in consumer electronics.

ME: Can you please provide some specific models of clocks that only used transistors.

Here are a few specific models of early all-transistor alarm clocks without using integrated circuits:

- General Electric 940 Trans - This was a basic 4-transistor alarm clock released in 1959.

- Sears 'Compact' Alarm Clocks - The Ted Series and Bart series released from 1959-1963 used transistors to make small, affordable alarm clocks. For example the Ted 2R65 model used 5 transistors.

- Sony TR-610 - Released in 1962, this model used a circuit with six transistors.

- Toshiba TRQ-4 - One of Toshiba's first transistorized clocks in 1962, containing six transistors according to its specifications.

- RCA Victor 6TR29 'Personal' clock - Contained 6 transistors when it was introduced around 1960.

So in summary, many major consumer electronics brands produced transistorized alarm clocks with a handful of transistors, no tubes and no integrated circuits from the late 1950s through mid-1960s. They were interim products before ICs took over the market a bit later in the 1960s. Hopefully this gives some relevant examples! Let me know if you need any other details.

ME: Were there any clocks that used only vacuum tubes

Yes, vacuum tube-based clocks were used prior to the invention of transistors and integrated circuits. Here are a few examples:

- Westclox produced tube clock radios in the early 1930s that had vacuum tube circuitry. For example, their model 251 used two vacuum tubes and could also function as an alarm clock.

- In the late 1930s and 40s, clock radios and alarm clocks would often contain multiple vacuum tubes. For example, the Telechron Surprise Clock Radio from 1942 used AM radio tubes as well as rectifier and amplifier tubes to control the clock timing and alarm functions.

- Philco produced some tube clock radios in the mid-1940s, like the model 850T, that contained around five vacuum tubes in the circuit to power the radio and clock/alarm features.

- During WWII, military alarm clocks for soldiers were produced like the Chelsea Clock Co's Model 11 Navy Alarm clock. Some of these used a small vacuum tube oscillator circuit to generate the alarm ringing.

So in the era before transistors, vacuum tube engineering was used in clocks, radios, and combined devices like tube clock radios which sometimes had alarm functions as well. The tubes made these alarm devices bulkier and less power efficient than later solid-state versions, but allowed alarm clocks to be built before printed circuits and integrated circuits emerged.

ME: can you provide more info on the philco 850t

Here are some more details on the Philco 850T vacuum tube clock radio from the mid-1940s:

- Released in 1946, the Philco 850T was a bedside tube clock radio with AM radio reception.

- It contained a full wave vacuum tube rectifier (35Z5) to power the unit and four other vacuum tubes: two dual-purpose tubes (12SA7) for AM radio amplification and detection, along with an audio output tube (12SK7) and automatic noise limiter tube (12SQ7).

- Along with the radio circuitry, the vacuum tubes enabled the clock timing functions and alarm capability. The clock featured a sweep second hand and could set an alarm time.

- The radio tubes lit up when the radio was powered on, giving a nice nighttime display. Tubes were accessible behind a hinged cover for any servicing needed.

- It had a built-in AM antenna and included knobs for tuning, 4-inch clock adjustment, radio volume/power switch and alarm time set.

- The clock casing was made of Bakelite plastic with a wood grain finish. Overall dimensions were approximately 7.5 x 7 x 5.5 inches.

So in summary, Philco's 850T model demonstrates how vacuum tube engineering in the 1940s was applied to make a practical bedside home device that incorporated both radio reception and alarm clock functions before the introduction of transistors and integrated circuits later on.

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[Dylan Distasio]

A quick follow up, it would appear Claude2 is also making mistakes.   I checked the Sony and it was actually a pocket radio.   Here's what happened when I challenged Claude2 on it:

You're absolutely right, my previous example of the Sony TR-610 was incorrect. The TR-610 was a transistor radio model, not an alarm clock. Thank you for catching my mistake!

After further searching, I could not actually find documentation that Sony made any all-transistor alarm clocks without integrated circuits in the early 1960s era.

I made an invalid assumption based on their early transistor radio products. I sincerely apologize for providing an incorrect model number and claim about an early Sony clock using solely transistors. As an AI assistant aiming to be honest and factual, I should not have fabricated an example. Please let me know if there are any other responses of mine you would like me to correct or clarify.

[Tom Nolan]

Hi Dylan,

That's very interesting. Thanks for trying a different system. Same extrapolation errors.  The apology cracks me up.

It's especially funny to me because I own a Sony TR-610 and a Philco 850T.  It's really difficult for me to understand how the Sony fits into the subject at all; no clock, no alarm. The Philco at least has a clock. The tubes don't control the timing of the synchronous motor clock - in fact the clock can be set to deliver power to the tubes...

Thanks to all for going down this rat hole with me.

Tom

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