Here's more information that someone requested on the HHCs. I will be
compiling a list of people who have requested to be in on the deal so
that everyone will know that their request was received.
Sam
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sun, 6 Jul 1997 13:39:13 -0400 (EDT)
From: Mikeooo1(a)aol.com
To: dastar(a)crl.com
Subject: Re: HHC
Hi Sam,
I can include as many ROM chips as you like,the width of the printer is
40 characters and thermal paper is available.Incidentally do you know someone
named BROSWELL ? He made me an offer for one of the Aim computers which I
accepted and that was the last I heard from him.
Regards,Mike
Howdy, guys & Gals!
I just came back from our local [p]university's junk-sale and I did find a
couple of interesting things:
they had all their equipment for sale: $5 per item. I left all the 8088 /
monochrome clone junk (I remember when these were bought... most *were*
junk).. I found an Epson LQ-500 with tractor feed -- $5. I picked up a Mac
IIsi ?/40 (nice Quantum 40Megger in it :-) for -- $5.00
[Drum roll, please]
And I found a Commie B-128. I've heard of the C-128... are these similar,
or is this actually the same thing, or what? I'm not big on Commie stuff
(goofiest basic I've ever played with... and slooooo disk drives) but I
collect for uniqueness, and this seemed rather unique.
It has a card-edge IEEE-488 port, card-edge cassette, cartridge, "normal"
RS-232 and other ports (that I don't remember... I just got a quick look at
it), the Serial number is 0025xx (don't remember last two digits, but it
seems early) and IIRC (but I haven't seen a C-128 in nearly a decade -- and
that was only at K-mart) it looks different from a C-128.
Did I do good?
Also, they had a PET-style CBM-8050 (or was that 5080...) dual garage-door
style disk drives, and a printer that hooked up thru a funky
Centronics-like cable. Interested in those? I could go back tomorrow.
Here's a question: Who's interested in typesetting equipment? They had a
Compugraphic machine with 8" drives there... dunno price. But it had
several font carts with it, and I do know this baby's classic. (The stuff I
used to work on was at least 10 years old, and this is older.)
Maybe I'll go back and get that tomorrow as well... if my wife doesn't kill
me first!
If anyone's interested in the other commie stuff lemme know today and I'll
snag it tomorrow. (E-mail's best... see below.)
Anywho, any info on the B-128 would be most appreciated!
Thanks one and all!
Roger "Merch" Merchberger
--
Roger Merchberger | Why does Hershey's put nutritional
Programmer, NorthernWay | information on their candy bar wrappers
zmerch(a)northernway.net | when there's no nutritional value within?
<reliable, they are not, as I bought a Conner CFS-850A 850 meg, and it worke
<nicely for a year, then one day I am greeted with this error:
<
<BOOT DISK FAILURE, SYSTEM HALTED.
Never confuse reliability with quality. the 3.5" drive have inherant
reliability over the larger ones but crap is still crap.
<no tape drive). fortunately the drive did have a 3 year warrenty, and a
<replacement was shipped, a 1.2 gig seagate ST-31276A. and here is another
<question:
<Is this going to last me more than a year? If Seagate made good drives in
<the past, will this new one live up to this, or is this drive chock full o
<corner cutting?
Unknown ask others. I have a fujitsu with no complaints but I know others
that see nothing but failures of the next larger and smaller model. I will
say I've seen models where vendor xx is the one to have and two years later
that vendor is producing duds. The MTBF for these drives is so high that
they should last for many years of you believe specs and all the parts are
up to quality. However a head crash suggests a defect or handling problems
(dropped) maybe before you even got it. I cringe when people ship hard
disks without major padding.
FYI I have at least three 3.5" drives with good media and dead boards! if
anyone has a wd-AC160 or wd-caviar2340 that's dead I'd love the board from
them. I have stuff on those that should have been backed up.
Allison
Ok, just spoke to Mike. Here's the deal:
Haven't gotten a price yet. He's concerned about shipping since these
units will be coming from Canada. Each unit weighs a little over 5 pounds
with the cpu, printer, tray and power supply. This is a little more than
I expected. He's going to try to have the units shipped in bulk directly
to the volunteer distributors. (So far Kirk (dynasoar) has volunteered to
be an east coast distributor. We need a mid-west, southwest and possibly
southern distributor. Please e-mail me if you wish to volunteer.) Shipped
in bulk, the shipping per unit on the first leg will not be that
significant. Its when you only have 1 or 2 coming to you on the 2nd leg
of shipping that will be significant with relation to the price of each
unit. I would say expect to pay upwards of $15 per each unit after
shipping. Again, if you did not anticipate this and want to or need to
back out, please do so soon.
Mike said it will take him a week to coordinate everything with the
company that has the units, so no new news until late next week...sorry.
Sam
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Computer Historian, Programmer, Musician, Philosopher, Athlete, Writer, Jackass
At 08:49 AM 7/14/97 BST, you wrote:
>> (But I always was, and always will be, a Robotron man...)
>Do you mean the East German Robotron Elektronik, or is this another
Robotron 2084 was a video game (put out by Williams, I think). The story
was that robots had taken over and were killing off mankind. You were man's
last hope as a super-ized human, you could shoot the robots and save the
people. You ran around doing just that. There were various types of
naughty robots and a family (mom, dad, son, daughter) that you ran over
(picked up?) to save.
What made Robotron different from most games was that it used 2 joysticks,
one for movement and one for firing. To be any good at the game, you had to
be able to work them independently of each other. Spent a lot of quarters
on that game.
There were other 2-joystick games, including Sinistar (mine bombs to blow up
Sinistar before it's completely built) and a spiderweb game which I forget
the name of.
--------------------------------------------------------------------- O-
Uncle Roger "There is pleasure pure in being mad
sinasohn(a)crl.com that none but madmen know."
Roger Louis Sinasohn & Associates
San Francisco, California http://www.crl.com/~sinasohn/
Allison:
>>the mod was to bring out ras* cas* and MUX* with terminating resistors at
one or both ends. These signals went through the EI cable but timing was
critical at best. the later EIs derived cas* and mux* off of ras* inside
rather than pipe them over. Generally speaking the mod was one where if it
was mostly working it MIGHT help, sometimes it made it worse.
There was another mod after that called the buffered EI cable...not a good
idea either. Fixing the EI was the solution.<<
One of the two units that I have has the mod and the other doesn't. The one
without came with the buffered EI cable, so what you said makes sense. Thanks
for the info; now I can trace the mod on the new schematics.
------------------------
Rich Cini/WUGNET
- ClubWin Charter Member (6)
- MCPS Windows 95/Networking
Philip:
Thanks for the error codes. I have no manuals for the Datamaster, so I'm
flying blind. The code "09" is inverse-blinking, so there is a real problem.
I'll try to pull the chips and re-seat them. The machine worked last summer
and wasn't used since then, so I can't imagine the chip going like that.
Thanks again for the help. I'll let you know what I find. My company has a UK
office (Burdale-Holdings, a trade finance company). If I do need a new chip,
maybe we could arrange it so that you could drop it off at our London office
(if you're near it) and they could send it to me.
------------------------
Rich Cini/WUGNET
- ClubWin Charter Member (6)
- MCPS Windows 95/Networking
Date: Tue, 15 Jul 97 09:05:06 BST
From: Philip.Belben(a)powertech.co.uk
To: classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: Datamaster troubles
Message-ID: <9706158689.AA868982856(a)compsci.powertech.co.uk>
Rich Cini wrote:
> Well, I'm reviving my Datamaster. Last year, it worked fine (I at least
> could get into Basic). This year, I can't even get it to boot. I have no
> manuals for the darned thing, so I have no idea what the numbers on the
screen
> during the POST mean. I have one reverse-highlighted number: "09" and I'm
> assuming that this is a hardware failure code.
As promised, I have hunted through my various IBM System/23 (Datamaster)
manuals, and found the meanings of the POD (Power-on Diagnostics) error
codes. Here is a summary:
FF}
00} CPU Failure (!)
01}
02 Failure of first ROS module (Read Only Storage module, i.e. ROM chip)
03 Reserved. If this is highlighted, panic.
04 Failure in bottom 16k of storage, or of storage controller
05 CRT (presumably actually monitor) or DMA failure
06} CRT interface
07}
08 Page registers
09-} ROS failure. There follows a little diagram to tell you which chip
19 } to replace. Yes, the diagram in the manual is made of text, too.
** TOP VIEW OF PLANAR SEEN FROM THE REAR **
_______________________________________________
| ====== ====== <-- NOT FOUND ON |
| | 10 | | 11 | <-- SOME EARLY |
| =3=40= =3=60= <-- MACHINES |
| |
| ====== ====== |
| | 19 | | 0D | |
| =7=60= =1=60= |
| *********************** |
| =PATCH= ====== * PHYSICAL LOCATION * |
| | 18 | | 0C | * OF ROS MODULES * |
| =7=40== =1=40= * FOR EACH ERROR CODE * |
| *********************** |
| ====== ====== |
| | 17 | | 0B | -KEY- |
| =6=60= =0=60= ====== |
| | XX | |
| ====== ====== =Y=ZZ= |
| | 16 | | 0A | XX=POD ERROR CODE |
| =6=40= =0=40= Y=ROS PAGE VALUE |
| ZZ=HIGH ORDER BYTE OF |
| ====== ====== FIRST ADDRESS IN |
| | 15 | | 09 | ROS MODULE. |
| =5=60= =0=20= |
| ---(CABLE)-------------- |
| ====== ====== | ====== | |
| | 14 | | 02 | | | 09 | CO-PLANAR | |
| =5=40= =0=00= | =0=20= BOARD. | |
| | (FOUND ON | |
| ====== | ====== SOME EARLY | |
| | 13 | | | 10 | MACHINES.) | |
| =4=60= | =3=40= | |
| | | |
| ====== | ====== | |
| | 12 | | | 11 | | |
| =4=40= | =3=60= | |
| ------------------------ |
-----------------------------------------------
1A-} ROS failure on feature card
26 }
27 ROS failure on 2nd printer card
28} ROS failure on feature card
29}
2A-} RAM failure. Table (which I shan't include) of how codes
30 } relate to different sizes of machine.
31 RAM page access failure
32 DMA page register failure
33 Interrupt controller failure
34 Timer interrupt failure
35 Keyboard error. If flashing, keyboard controller.
If not flashing, you pressed a key at the wrong moment :-)
36 Printer failure
37 Printer not switched on
38 Diskette attachment failure
39 24 volt rail not reading 24 volts
3A-} belong to add-ons not to the system. I didn't bring the
FE } relevant manual pages.
General rules for interpretation:
Flashing inverse video = fatal error.
Non-flashing inverse video = error. Press the Error-reset key and
let the machine finish booting. Then run the diagnostics dikette,
I suppose.
To summarise, it appears you have a dud ROM chip. I imagine the
solution is to copy a ROM chip from another Datamaster. If necessary, I
can arrange to copy mine, but I don't know off-hand what sort of chips
they are. I would also suggest that, unless you too are in England,
logistics of getting the chip to you might be hard...
Philip.
<><><><><><><><><><><><><><> Philip Belben <><><><><><><><><><><><><><>
Das Feuer brennt, das Feuer nennt die Luft sein Schwesterelement -
und frisst sie doch (samt dem Ozon)! Das ist die Liebe, lieber Sohn.
Poem by Christian Morgenstern - Message by Philip.Belben(a)powertech.co.uk
> Hello there, I run a fileserver that has 2 ST-225 20 meg drives, and 1
NEC
> 420 meg IDE drive, this system runs 24/7, and has been running for 2
months
> continuous now. My question is what is the life expectancy of these
drives,
> it is often said that the ST-225 series are not reliable, however they
> continue to run strong. also these things run so hot that you can fry an
egg
> on it! :)
Where is the heat localized? The logic board gets hot around the bearing
(bushing), but the case itself shouldn't get hot. I'd be worried.
I deal with a *lot* of old systems, and I don't see any more dead ST-225's
than others.
I always keep an ST-225 around, 'cause I *know* it'll go on #2 in the ROM
drive table if I can't locate the listing in the BIOS.
->On the OUTSIDE, in their scrap yard, is where most of the computer
->stuff ends up. I once found a WICAT *and* an EXORCISOR II out
->there-- both filled with water. (Sob!).
Heh, I would have used that to get them cheap. Then I'd take them home
wash them out throughly and disassembled and dried them well. Generally
water is not that damaging. Just done power them wet.
Allison
