Not a Sewing Machine: A Multimedia Briefcase

When you think of Singer, you usually think of sewing machines, although if you are a history buff, you might remember they diversified into calculators, flight simulation, and a few …read more

May 16, 2025 - 09:10

Not a Sewing Machine: A Multimedia Briefcase

When you think of Singer, you usually think of sewing machines, although if you are a history buff, you might remember they diversified into calculators, flight simulation, and a few other odd businesses for a while. [Techmoan] has an unusual device from Singer that is decidedly not a sewing machine. It is a 1970s-era multimedia briefcase called the Audio Study Mate. This odd beast, as you can see in the video below, was a cassette player that also included a 35mm filmstrip viewer. Multimedia 1970s-style!

The film strip viewer is a bright light and a glass screen with some optics. You have to focus the image, and then a button moves the film one frame. However, that’s for manual mode. However, the tape could encode a signal to automatically advance the frame. That didn’t work right away.

Luckily, that required a teardown of the unit to investigate. Inside was a lot of vintage tech, and at some point, the auto advance started working somewhat. It never fully worked, but for a decades-old electromechanical device, it did pretty well.

We do, sometimes, miss what you could pull off with 35mm film.