So you've heard of the internet. It's rad.
Always a relevant prior conversation! And if there isn't one, you make one and add it to your matrix of stories and insight. I don't know how you keep track of all your links. I'll occasionally read my comment history and won't remember having written a word of some of it.
google search: kleinbl00 mosaic theremin I wasn't sure if it was reddit or hubski but I knew I'd told the story before. One nice thing about Reddit getting huge and me being off it for five years or more: I'm no longer near the top of the search results.
And today you could probably find the tubes and transistors for those schematics on dozens of different online retailers. Hell, you could post it on Hubski. It's possible I have the tubes you needed sitting in one of many shoeboxes of tubes. I might even have the transistors (but probably not). Back then you had to know the guy with shoeboxes of obsolete parts.
...yeah. Took me 15 seconds to type "robert moog tube theramin" to find the schematic and another 45 seconds to find every fucking tube on eBay. You gotta keep in mind - I spent three days crawling around warehouses of vintage electronics parts down south of the Dome in Seattle. A shoebox of obsolete parts didn't cut it - neither did a warehouse of obsolete parts. Now? Well, I'd built one of these before the Internet was more than Mosaic. And had learned that the Theremin is only marginally less annoying than the Hang drum.
It looks like I have the three 6K8s, 5V4, and a Google search says a VR150 is the same as a 0D3, which I have. I'm not sure how people made those relations before the internet, though. 0D3 doesn't even show up in my RCA Receiving Tube Manual, much less VR150. Looks like the GE application manual (PDF found online) did match them up. No luck on the 6F6s or 6B8s, though. The RCA manual says a 12C8 has the same characteristics (but different filament voltage) as a 6B8, but I don't have any of those, either. What looks so impossible to me is the RF transformers. All that's stamped on the ones in my tuner is the patent number and part number. Matching a random part up with the part needed would be annoying today but pretty much impossible pre-internet.
You mean iMalWare for OS X? Yeah, buddy installed that on my rig because he needed a copy of Premiere. Then it started uploading all my apps. I told him that if what we were after was a pirated copy of Premiere I could get it without giving my computer the clap. Fuckin' amateurs.
Now hang on just a durn minnit there, young-un. Limewire was NOT malware. Limewire was the last "real" internet application, in that it expected you to give in order to receive. If you wanted to download files, you also had to host files. But, even better than that, you didn't host the WHOLE file for anything! That way the Feds and Tipper Gore couldn't come to your house and accuse you of "stealing" because you didn't have any whole files... only bits and pieces... and that was a loophole in the law through which Limewire existed. For a time. I loved that app. And I loved the philosophy that you had to give to receive...
L0000000L Limewire was the scabies of warez There was nothing on Limewire that didn't start out on one of the warez sites, usually repackaged with clumsy bullshit scene kidz .nfo files and almost always with a lot of the functionality broken. And you TOTALLY hosted the whole file. Whether you liked it or not. Inviting Limewire into your life was inviting someone's haxie browser to cruise your entire hard drive and post its contents for everyone else with Limewire installed. There was nothing on Limewire that wasn't put there by someone who didn't need to use Limewire.