When the new and the old collide, it is always an interesting affair. What you thought was fashionable during your youth is now loathed upon by your own kids, just like how you felt about your parents’ dressing sense back in their day. Well, sometimes retro does make a comeback in different ways, and you cannot get any more retro than this Twittertape Machine. The Twittertape Machine happens to be the brainchild of an avid DIY enthusiast, piecing it together to print out tweets instead of stock prices. It is one machine that prefers the style of the 19th-century ticker tape machine, using said style to print out whatever tweets that have been sent.
British Web developer Adam Vaughan was the one behind the Twittertape Machine, having built it from scratch, and he has described it to be an “astounding device will print a permanent copy of all tweets yet requires no ink or computer.” What kind of wizardry has made the Twittertape Machine possible? Deep within its wooden base lies a thermal printer and a microcontroller, which will be hooked up to a computer via Ethernet, and it will check on Vaughan’s Twitter account for new data every half a minute. Whatever it picks up with each check will then result in the printing of said tweet.