>I'd like to know how people here store their junk parts, as I'm looking
>for an efficient method myself. For the past several years, I've been
>keeping them in ziplock bags in a plastic box, which is falling apart, and
>also is useless for storing anything small.
Indeed, "junk parts" covers everything from tiny surface mount resistors
to entire 400-pound tape and disk drives here :-).
Small stuff goes in the Akro-Mills style of plastic drawers. I long ago
gave up using those dividers that they give you a few of - small parts
just slip underneath way to easy.
Most all of the hardware collection resides in the same plastic drawers.
I've got the photo stuff drawers here pretty well segregated from the random
electronic and hardware stuff drawers, but otherwise there isn't a lot of
order. Well, that's not entirely true: the IDC connectors are nicely
arrayed by type (header, socket, edge connector) and size (10-16-20-26-34-
40-50-60) in a nice matrix. And the 1/4" and 1/2" watt resistors are
nicely collected and ordered too.
Moderately larger stuff (including even 3.5" disk drives) will fit into the
large plastic drawers.
Small PC boards generally get put in anti-static bags and then into cardboard
"Stor-All" letter file boxes.
Larger PC boards go into larger boxes. For instance, Unibus hex-height
boards go into an 18" x 12" box.
The next step up from PC boards are, of course, rack-mount chassis. These
generally get piled on top of each other or on shelves until they're tested
and put into a real rack. There's a big pile, probably three hundred pounds
worth, of various rack rails here waiting to be matched up with boxes.
Standard rack-mount drives (you know, like RL02's, etc.) get stacked on top
of each other if they're spares, put in a rack if part of an actual system.
Working tape drives always go into racks. Tape drives in the process of being
repaired generally occupy their own chunk of floor space. There's usually
a delay from repair to mounting in rack until I can convince someone to
help me heave it into a rack and stand the rack back up.
Random stuff (monitors, keyboards) go on prefab shelves, along with
cardboard boxes filled with PC boards.
9-track tapes, 14" removable disk packs, etc., go where God intended them:
into Wright Line media shelves intended just for the application. Admittedly
there's a few hundred 9-tracks in a pile in the corner waiting either for me
to put them to use or go recycle them.
There's hundreds of boxes of 8" floppies lined up on shelves underneath
my workbenches.
TK50's fit very nicely into 9" x 12" cardboard boxes, which are then
stacked upon each other.
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Hi. I need help unsubscribing from this list. Here's the deal:
Currently, I use the addrfess review(a)thereviewguide.com to access eMail.
I subscribed (and currently use the reply address) tim(a)thereviewguide.com
. However, since then, I no longer have SMTP server that I can access. I
write eMAil via telnet and use pine. So when I try to unsubscribe, I gert
an error that I can't unsubscribe because I'm not subscribed.
I also didn't see a 'reply to' option under pine.
So how canI unsubscribe? CAn someone kick me? Any ideas?
Thanks,
Tim
Many, many, thanks to the person who posted the fix for gooey
print-hammer pads!! The one I got had turned viscid, so I scraped
it off, cleaned the tab, and affixed one of those little
peel-n-stick rubber feet. (one trade name is 'Bumpon'). It works
perfectly, and is just the right height.
Now I am diagnosing the machine.. it has a stuck something in the
keyboard/reader. Some keys print a different character, and a few
print only their shifted symbol, and vice-versa. Neither does Return
work, tho I can trip the pawl by hand and the carriage smacks me in
the knuckle every time. Reading a test tape produces the same
result. So I am going to spread out the manuals and figure out which
codes are getting mangled.
Other than that, it seems in good shape, still nicely oiled and
all belts in good condition... even the ribbon is still dark,
except for the portion that has been exposed for the last twenty
years, sitting on that lonely shelf...
According to the Laws of Surplus Attractionm can a PDP-8 be far
behind??
Cheers
John
Out bretheren on the Pacific Rim don't share our sense of ethics nor do they
revere the notion of intellectual property rights, or patents, for that
matter as we do. If you have a product made, say in Korea or Taiwan, it's
almost certain you'll have a competitor making the same thing using tooling
exactly like yours within a few weeks, and they don't have to earn
50Megabucks in NRE costs. If they never see a working model, as, indeed,
they may not, they're going to have a much easier time cloning your product
with the schematics and programmable device listings than without,
particularly if your product is just a board for a PC. In the latter case,
they often don't even know what it does, but just reproduce it and sell it
to someone who buys pirate copies of the doc or ships the product without.
If it's your product, YOU make the market, and THEY make the profit.
Dick
-----Original Message-----
From: Tony Duell <ard(a)p850ug1.demon.co.uk>
To: Discussion re-collecting of classic computers
<classiccmp(a)u.washington.edu>
Date: Tuesday, July 06, 1999 5:45 PM
Subject: Re: OT: A call to arms (sort of)
>>
>> > Odd... I've got several hundred (no exageration) service manuals here.
>> > All containing schematics, etc. In a lot of cases there's enough
>> > product.
>>
>> ???!!?!?!!!!
>>
>> Tucked away in just about _every_ manuafacturer's R&D department is a
>> room that contains as many of their competitor's products and manuals as
>> they can get their hands on. If you think that electronic companies do
>> not use this tactic to "improve" their products, you are wrong.
>
>Of course they do. But I won't accept that the service manual gives them
>that much help. And I can't think of a case where a service manual has
>been the cause of a clone.
>
>Given a working example of a product you can 'reverse engineer' it to
>better than the level of information in the service manual in a couple of
>weeks. Using only a DMM and a simple logic analyser. The former to get a
>rat's nest of the connections, the latter to assign useful
>names/functions to pins on gate arrays. Believe me, it's not hard.
>
>And I know that a lot of companies do just that to competing products.
>I've talked to people who do just that.
>
An automatic tester can give you a netlist in a day's time, assuming you
have a board and someone to program the tester. However, getting from a
netlist of a board with, say 1000 components on it to a schematic can take a
long time. By that I mean a LONG time. I've seen where it has taken a week
to get a correct schematic of a 3"x4" board. Now what about a 9" x 12" one?
>
>Therefore, the service manual isn't _that_ valuable. Not having it
>doesn't stop the above. And from what I've heard (and observed on classic
>computers), you would be very unwise to rely on a manual. Errors creep
>in. Things are missed out. Important details of things like signal timing
>can only be deduced from the product itself. In other words, even with
>the manual you are going to want to dismantle and analyse a real machine.
>
The sevice manual can shorten the time to do the job from weeks to days.
That's pretty helpful if you ask me.
>
>>
>> Service manuals do a great job of giving up company secrets! These days,
>> the things are generally marked "confidential" and do not leave the
>> buildings.
>
>I will assure you that restricting the service manuals like this doesn't
>hinder 'the competition' that much at all. What it does hinder are
>non-official service agents, though. That, IMHO is the main reason for
>restricting them. And I am not happy with that.
>
>>
>> William Donzelli
>> aw288(a)osfn.org
>>
>
>-tony
>
I have gotten RSTS/E V9.1 re-sysgenned on my 11/44 to include
support for RL02s, RK05s, RX02s, and a few other things.
I have spent some time getting the hardware configured properly.
As a result of the new sysgen, I can now init, erase, and mount the
RL02s. 'show dev' indicates the RL02 mounted, yet when I try to
write to the drive, get a directory, or allocate the drives, I get a
'Device not available' message from RSTS.
I have tried mounting them /PUBLIC, tried re-initing them, nothing
seems to change. If I try to do anything with them dismounted, I get
'Device not mounted' as you would expect.
I have the RSTS Orange Wall coming in a few weeks, until then I am
limited to the 'help' facility.
The RL02s are working fine, I have the docs and specs and have
verified that they are 'OK'. The scratch pack I am using was new and
never used before. During the Init process, I specified
three-pattern initialization, which completed normally in about 15
minutes, finding and marking three bad blocks along the way.
So... anyone have any ideas? What am I doing stupid? What am I
*not* doing? Calling all RSTS Gurus....
Cheers
John
>> I'll also point out that NRZI requires a lot tighter physical tolerances
>> on the alignment of the tape head (the reason why many drives don't support
>> 800 BPI NRZI at all) than 1600 and 6250 BPI (which allow substantial skew
>> between the tape channels as part ofthe spec.) If at some point the head
>> in your transport had been replaced or knocked around without properly
>> being re-aligned you might see something like what you're seeing.
>Would you? Most tape head/path adjustments are only really critical for
>'interchanageability' -- so that tapes on one drive can be read on
>others. If the head is slightly skewed, it will write a skewed tape, but
>it will also be expecting to read a tape that's similarly skewed (and
>that's what it will get).
>
>Now, admittedly if they're way out it's not going to work. But then it
>probably wouldn't read a 1600bpi distribution either.
What you say above is certainly true for tape systems where the same
head is used for reading and writing, and most small tape drives fall
into this category. But most 7-track and 9-track drives have separate
read and write heads, and these are often out of skew with each other.
Because the read and write heads are often part of the same assembly,
the necessary deskewing can be a combination of both physical
adjustment (to get the read head correctly aligned) and electronic
timing adjustment (to get the write pulses aligned on tape relative to
the read head.) There may be some drives where the write head is
physically adjusted and the read timings are electronically adjusted,
but this makes the entire procedure much more difficult - what good
does a master skew tape do you in doing mechanical alignment of the
write heads??? :-)
For most drives with electronic deskewing (and the Kennedy 9100 and successors
certainly fall in this category) when you get a replacement head it comes
with a set of "starting" electronic deskewing settings. I'll gladly fax
you the section of a Kennedy maintenance manual that details the procedure,
if you're interested.
>I would cartainly look for other causes before tweaking head adjustment
>screws.
Absolutely. Barring physical damage (a good drop onto concrete from
a few feet is enough to whack other things out of alignment) I'd look for other
causes first. The NRZI data path is different than the PE data
path, for one thing.
--
Tim Shoppa Email: shoppa(a)trailing-edge.com
Trailing Edge Technology WWW: http://www.trailing-edge.com/
7328 Bradley Blvd Voice: 301-767-5917
Bethesda, MD, USA 20817 Fax: 301-767-5927
Hi Tony,
>My Sirius is very 'fussy' about the disks it will handle. It won't use
>most 360K disks. It will work with '80 track' disks....
Interesting, the only discs mine objects to are, surprise, surprise, 1.2Mb
ones.
I'm pretty sure that the discs I used in mine were a mixture of 48tpi and 96tpi
media, no problems with either type here.
>....One day I'll get some suitable drives to experiment with and see if I
>can get it to handle DS, or if there are other changes.
AFAIK the disc controller is exactly the same for SS/DS drives, IE no firmware
changes etc.
>Any ideas which version of MS-DOS that would be? I have 1.25 and 2.2 I
>think somewhere.
OK, I DO have a copy of 1.25 which will access the hard drive. However since
it's v1.25 it's only of academic interest - I also have a copy of (I think) DOS
2.11, complete in "Victor" colours, but that refuses to see the hard drive at
all. I'm told I need a different version of 2.11 which includes support for the
hard drive.
TTFN - Pete.
--
Hardware & Software Engineer. Sound Engineer.
Collector of Arcade Machines, Games Consoles & Obsolete Computers (esp DEC)
peter.pachla(a)virgin.net |
peter.pachla(a)vectrex.freeserve.co.uk |
peter.pachla(a)wintermute.free-online.co.uk | www.wintermute.free-online.co.uk
--
Hi,
>The Mac I just got is a "Macintosh Classic II" , and I think it has a 1.44
>floppy drive.. It has System 7.1 OS also....
>....So I will ask again if someone knows how I can teach the Mac to read
>floppys from my PC, and also the reverse.
You need a utility like "Dos Mounter" which lets you read/write MS-DOS format
discs; the Classic II has a SuperDrive in it so you'll have no problems if you
can find the software.
I can't help I'm afraid as my Classic II is up the shoot - the ROM on the
internal HD has failed (you don't have the facility to read ROMs do you???).
TTFN - Pete.
--
Hardware & Software Engineer. Sound Engineer.
Collector of Arcade Machines, Games Consoles & Obsolete Computers (esp DEC)
peter.pachla(a)virgin.net |
peter.pachla(a)vectrex.freeserve.co.uk |
peter.pachla(a)wintermute.free-online.co.uk | www.wintermute.free-online.co.uk
--
> Well, in my case it was supposed to lead to the development of a really
> open hardware platform.
>
> As for Allison's comment that SPARC is to "high end" I have to disagree.
> The SPARC architecture was initally a lot less complicated than the PDP-11
> architecture. It is the funky MMUs that get in the way.
I'm reluctant to enter this rather heated debate, but:
Has anyone tried to build a SPARC - compatible processor out of standard SSI and
MSI chips?
Has anyone any thoughts on how easy, or otherwise, it would be?
Philip.
PS since I'm in here:
Dick - it's all very well to choose a bus because it is a popular, de facto
standard, but if you don't conform pretty closely to the standard, you may as
well not have a standard at all. And what other reasons are there for choosing
ISA?
Tony - OPEN doesn't mean everything is documented. It means you can connect
what you like to it. And know what to do to get it to work.
Chuck (wasn't it) suggested having an OPEN hardware architecture for which
anyone can build periphereals and CPU cards which, if they conform to the OPEN
spec, will be guaranteed to work. I think this is an excellent idea.
However, there is nothing wrong with using undocumented cards on the OPEN-spec
bus which happen to work because they were designed for the system on which the
spec was based. Win-win! Those like you who want a fully documented system can
have one. Those like Dick who want to be able to use cheap cards from the 50p
bin at that shop in Notting Hill can do that too. As I said, win-win.
P.
PPS I am concerned aboout the report that the open software movement is losing
momentum. Does anyone have any more news on this? I read quite recently that
Intel is trying to negotiate with some of the Linux community to get Linux
available for their next generation of processors right from the start. The
difficulty seems to be NDAs, not surprisingly. I hope they solve it (e.g. no
disclosure until launch date, free thereafter).
P.
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