Another weird old computer from the Bins – Crown TEF-12

Saw this weird box with the Crown logo on it in the reject bin right by the checkout as I was leaving and turned right on around to check it out more closely. Once I figured out how to open the front (push the two ‘top’ feet inwards!) I saw it was an old luggable in an interesting format. Bought it without hesitation for the perfunctory price asked, and took it home to dig in further…

The front is pretty familiar as far as early 80s luggable computers go.

The back gets interesting. Bunch of audio I/O that very unusual.

And inside we find this built like a tank modular machine with all kinds of extra audio handling functionality.

I haven’t researched it thoroughly yet, but it looks like it was capable of pretty groundbreaking acoustic data collection and visualization for its time. I’ll leave the specifics to another post by someone who used one of these things to great effect back when it was new: https://www.tvtechnology.com/opinions/audio-breakthroughs-with-tef-analysis

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