A Reddit member was shocked when a 1960s computer panel appeared from a family garage that had collapsed.

 A Reddit member was shocked when a 1960s computer panel appeared from a family garage that had collapsed.

A Reddit user recently posted pictures of the pre-moon landing mainframe component to the "retro battlestations" community, which honors ancient computers, after finding a rare RCA Spectra 70/35 computer control panel from 1966 in their family's old collapsed garage. The original poster stated that "1,500lbs of mainframe"—the remaining portion of the computer system—would be needed to actually run it after cleaning the panel and repairing the majority of the key switches.

It turned out that the poster was unaware that the panel had been in the garage for decades. Son Of A Dead Meme clarified in the thread on Friday, "My house is a two-family, and my dad used to rent out the other half before I was born." "One of the people who rented out the apartment worked at IBM (apparently the RCA Spectra 70's were compatible with IBM sets from the time) and shortly before he left he shown up with a forklift and left something in the garage.

Because of the structure's declining state, the machinery was concealed for many years. "No one bothered to enter the garage because it was in terrible shape and had since collapsed. "After several decades, I discovered the RCA terminal and a crate marked 'Return to IBM San Jose,'" wrote Son Of A Dead Meme. Though they acknowledged that their cellar was "jam-packed with stuff," they conjectured that the unidentified IBM component in the crate was "something power supply related.

The Spectra 70 was usually operated by a video terminal console that was connected to the machine and offered an interactive text-based experience, or by a teletype, which is comparable to an electronic typewriter. However, based on drawings in RCA's documentation, the panel found in the garage seems to be the maintenance control panel for the Spectra 70/35 computer itself, which would have been positioned on the side of the main processor cabinet. Along with several rows of indicator lights (including Q0-Q13 in the pictures), different control switches for system functions, and a "Memory Address Stop" panel for debugging, it also prominently displays the "70/35 SYSTEM" designation. The main "Power" button is used to turn on the computer.


The RCA Spectra 70/35 control panel in close-up, as it would appear when illuminated from the rear.



A close-up of the buttons on the RCA Spectra 70/35 control panel.

The RCA Spectra 70/35 control panel's back wiring.

The finding is especially intriguing since, although we discovered other old examples of identical 70/35 RCA computer panels (such as the 70/45) from photo archives and scanned PDFs on websites like bitsavers, no pictures of this specific model appear to be available online.

We're assuming that the device comes from a time that must look considerably different because the discoverer mentioned in a Reddit comment that they had an Android "RCA tablet" when they were nine years old. Son Of A Dead Meme shared some of their feelings of awe upon realizing how uncommon the panel is in a brief interview Ai Tech Gadget did with the poster via Reddit.

Son Of A Dead Meme commented to Ai Tech, "I didn't completely realize how rare it was until I first found it in the garage about 4 years ago." "The true gravity of it struck when I made the decision to begin doing more in-depth research on it. Only one of the set's pictures that I could locate was contemporary, but none of the pictures—both old and new—were of a Spectra 70/35. All of them are 70/45s and 70/55s. Having something you didn't make and being unable to locate a picture of it that you didn't take is strange.

The RCA Spectra 70 series was an attempt by RCA to directly compete with IBM's System/360 mainframe computers, which were the industry standard at the time, in the middle of the 1960s. Wikipedia states that RCA offered software compatibility with IBM systems and released the Spectra 70 line in 1965 (shipping it in 1966). This allowed companies to switch hardware providers without having to rewrite their programs. Additionally, the systems appeared on television in the 1970s in programs such as The Bionic Woman and The Incredible Hulk.

RCA used what was referred to as "third-generation" computer technology to innovate rather than simply copying IBM with the Spectra models.incorporating integrated circuits to lower overall size and power consumption. The systems were marketed by RCA in 1965 as having "the industry's first monolithic integrated circuitry in full-scale systems."

The Spectra 70 family featured five variants with increasing memory capacities and speeds: the 70/15, 70/25, 70/35, 70/45, and 70/55. By merging two 16,384-byte core memory modules, operators were able to configure the system with up to 32,768 bytes of memory (32K), which is a fair amount for the mid-1960s but extremely small by today's standards. In contrast, the Apple II personal computer, which came out ten years later, could use up to 48K of memory.
An image from around 1965 showing personnel operating a control panel for an RCA Spectra 70, like the one in the garage.




SonOfADeadMeme thinks the 70/35 panel was taken from the computer's decommissioning and wound up in his family's garage. "Sadly, I believe the system may have been disassembled at IBM, and the man kept the terminal as a memento. I looked everywhere while it was still standing, but the only computers I could find were an Apple IIE and a Compaq that I believe was thrown away (kept the Apple II but couldn't find the Compaq)." However, they clarified, "I did make sure to pretty much clean the entire place out before the collapse."

When RCA left the mainframe computer industry in 1971, it ended the Spectra series, which led to a growing scarcity of surviving models. Univac purchased the company's computer business.It phased away existing Spectra installations completely after briefly continuing to support them.

Regarding what the control panel would do in the future, the original poster had imaginative ideas for this chapter in computer history. "Unfortunately I don't think I'm ever finding the other 1,500lbs of mainframe needed to use the luxurious 34 kilobytes of memory so I may (without altering a single Goddamn thing) string some LEDs behind the front panel and set them to blink at random."

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https://www.aitechgadget.com/2025/06/a-reddit-member-was-shocked-when-1960s.html