This E Ink Badge Celebrates the History of Tandem Computers
Keith Moore remembers Tandem Computers with great fondness, which is why he designed this DEF CON badge last year.
Commodore, Apple, Sinclair, Amstrad — there are many legendary names in computing history. But most of the household names are companies that produced personal computers for the consumer market. On the commercial and industrial side of the market, there were many other influential names have since faded into historical obscurity. Tandem Computers is a great example and 2024 marked 50 years since its founding. To celebrate that occasion, Keith Moore designed this delightful Tandem Computers E Ink badge.
Even most retrocomputing enthusiasts (myself included) aren’t familiar with Tandem Computers. They did attempt to bring a personal computer to market, but it ended up being more of a glorified “smart” terminal. Most of Tandem Computers’ products were targeted at business applications. Those were mainframes and servers, including the popular Tandem NonStop (TNS) series. Many users of those machines, such as Moore, remember them with great fondness.
Moore designed this Tandem Anniversary Badge for DEF CON and it has a lot of appeal. Its three most visible features are an array of LEDs, a bank of switches, and an E Ink display. Moore designed the LEDs and switches to represent the switch panels found on the TNS-I, TNS-II, and TXP systems. The E Ink display is a more practical inclusion intended to give wearers the ability to identify themselves — their name and, optionally, employee number. That also shows useful status information, such as battery charge. The backside of the badge depicts a Tandem system diagram in the silkscreen.
The badge is constructed as a pair of PCBs stacked with standoffs. There are two sets of SAO (Simple Add-On) headers, as is the custom for these badges. The display and microcontroller are a single module: the LILYGO TTGO T5, which integrates a 4.7” ePaper screen and ESP32-S3 MCU into a single development board. Power comes from a small lithium battery, which should last a long time, because E Ink screens only consume power when refreshing display content.
If you appreciate the charm of this badge, you can purchase a kit from Moore on Tindie for $45. Or, because it is an open-source project, you can make it for yourself independently.
