We All Knew How to Strip a Wire

We All Knew How to Strip a Wire

In 1986 the Famicom reached the television through an RF switch, and the RF switch failed. So we opened it. Strip the cable back with a knife or a pair of scissors, get the copper out, build the connection again — and it worked, more often than you would expect. Everyone I knew could do this. Nobody taught us. It was the price of playing.

That same year Sharp put the Famicom and the Disk System into one red-and-black chassis, sold it for 32,000 yen, and gave it composite AV output. One cable. A clean picture. No knife. Nintendo would not ship a Famicom with composite output of its own until December 1993 — seven years later. People remember the picture, and it was better. What stays with me is the other thing Sharp did: they made the knife unnecessary. That is the harder achievement.

The Disk System sold its games on rewritable disks. Twenty-six hundred yen for the disk, and then five hundred yen at the rewriting kiosk to have it wiped and a different game written onto it. Five hundred yen was pocket money. For the first time, a game was a sum a child could hold in his hand. And the writing machine itself, standing there in the shop — waiting in front of it was the whole thrill.

I will say it plainly: the Famicom is not a good-looking machine. It has charm, but it is not handsome. Masayuki Uemura, who designed it, explained the red years later — it was the colour of president Yamauchi's scarf. Once that red was fixed, nothing else could argue with it, so the rest went white. Not a cost decision. A surrender to one red. The Twin Famicom, sitting beside it, is doing something else entirely. It is almost sweet now. The shape makes me wonder whether someone was thinking of a flying saucer. Sharp sold it that way in 1986 — sleek, compact, cool. A dream of the near future, in the design and in what it did.

It comes to my bench forty years on. The drive belt is dead, and people will tell you the belt is the repair. It is not. The read timing drifts, a little off here and a little off there, and to give the machine another long life you have to tune the whole mechanism, not one part of it. That is what happens here before one is allowed to leave. The boy who stripped wires with a knife now tunes machines for strangers. And I still like the look of it — a saucer that landed in 1986, carrying a future that was, for a while, actually arriving.