I was given a Syquest 200MB (I believe model number SQ5200) the other
day along with a pile of cartridges... some 200 MB and some 44 MB.
I knew of these drives in the day but never played with one so it's an
interesting exploration. I was considering hooking it to my PDP-11/34
via CMD SCSI controller except...
The drive will mount most of the cartridges although it seems to take
a while. I hear a loud clunk, like a head load sound every few seconds
as the orange LED on the front runs through a cycling pattern of blinking
fast and then slower. After a few cycles of this, the green LED comes
on and then I can sometimes read some data from the drive.
I've got it hooked to a Linux box currently and I've seen a Mac partition
table go by (which makes sense as this stuff was used in a print shop with
a Macintosh). But after a few seconds of spinning, the drive appears to
fault and goes back to the blinking orange LED again. After a little
while of this, then it seems to just lock up... you can't eject the
cartridge with the front panel button and the SCSI interface pretty much
goes dead as the drive can no longer been seen by the host.
I suspected the power supply in the enclosure it is mounted in so I have
swapped that but no improvement. The original was drooping a little
on +12 (down to 11.5v) and although that didn't seem like a huge issue,
I have lots of supplies to substitute so I did.
So, are there any common things that go wrong with these drives-- that
were easily remedied? The heads look extremely fragile with a very
tiny wire looped around the outter edge so I am not so excited about
trying to clean them. The drive otherwise looks pretty clean inside...
and the fact that I can read _some_ data suggests that there is life
and something may just need cleaning, aligning or stopped from slipping.
On the other hand, I am not so sure these drives were designed for field
repair or service...
Chris
--
Chris Elmquist
I have recently completed testing of some IOB6120 boards, and I've sold
a few in the Spare Time Gizmos group, but now I'm offering them for sale
here, too. This isn't related to the earlier group buy (which, as far
as I know, folks are still waiting for), and in fact isn't a group buy at
all. I've already bought the necessary materials, assembled, and even
tested these things. (I have no bare boards or unassembled kits available.)
According to my email archive, $215 was the asking price for similarly
configured boards back when, and that still seems reasonable to me.
A little more for international shipping. (Feel free to donate additional
funds, of course :-).)
There are some minor variations between the units -- most have box headers
for the (untested) digital I/O interface option, but a couple have bare male
headers. All have box headers for the serial ports, and on the bottom all
have a bare 50 pin male header, a two-pin female header (for CPREQ), and
a bit of purple electrical tape to protect the +3V poles of the batteries
>from bumping up against stuff. These have been assembled with no-clean
63-37 tin-lead solder (and will still have residual flux on them).
If you want one of these, please contact me off-list: v.slyngstad at
frontier.com.
Here are the particulars of the testing I have done:
Each of the four ram-disk has passed the "RF" pattern test.
The CF interface has performed a "DF" command on even and odd numbered
partitions, and booted OS/8 successfully from a bootable CF.
The flash responds to commands and has been programmed. It should be
noted that these boards have 29F400 flash instead of 28F400 flash installed.
This means you'd need to get new firmware for the IOB6120 to be able to
reprogram the flash with the "FL" command. I can probably provide a pair
of 27256 EPROM programmed with unofficial firmware for about an additional
$10 , but I have only so many chips, and would rather not unless you
actually plan to modify the flash.
The FLASH extension ROM is recognized and correctly initializes the FPGA,
which then passes the self-tests.
The clock/calendar has been set (PDT) and keeps the date/time and
partition map settings for days at a time, so the battery and battery
back-up seem to be working.
The VT52 terminal emulation has been tried and works. Right-CTL-G
generates a "beep" from the speaker as expected.
The 3 serial ports all independently display characters and accept input at
9600 baud. I am prepared to throw in a single serial cable -- with a 10
pin header on one end, and a male DE9 connector on the other.
The printer port is capable of individually lighting LEDs from each of the 7
data pins. (Data pin 8 is actually masked off in the FPGA, so it's
obviously set up for 7-bit ASCII.) (I don't have a proper working parallel
printer to hook up for actual printing.)
Vince
--
o< The ASCII Ribbon Campaign Against HTML Email!
I finally gave in and got an Atari 1040ST, I used to have one but
foolishly got rid of it a long time ago. However, it has a problem
reading diskettes. It can read the root directory and at least one
subdirectory and display a file from a diskette with text files on it,
but what it prints is completely garbled.
I have taken it apart and taken the shield plate off the drive and
cleaned the heads with alcohol, but it still won't work. I suspect the
problem is with the stepper motor drive. It makes a rather nasty noise
when trying to seek; I remember it was fairly loud but this one makes a
sharper noise than I remember. Looking at it trying to read a disk, it
looks as if the heads don't move at all. As far as I can see, the
stepper motor has a cogwheel on the end of the axle, which moves the
heads via a rack which meshes with the cogwheel. It looks to my ageing
eyes as if the rack has chewed a slot round the middle of the cogwheel,
which would explain why the heads don't move. Somehow I don't think the
cogwheel should look like that.
If the cogwheel is broken, I shall have to get a replacement drive,
fortunately they seem fairly common on eBay. Making a new cogwheel and
probably a new rack is completely out of the question for me, and
replacing the motor and rack doesn't seem like a particularly viable or
economic option for me (it probably would be for Tony, but then I don't
have a metalworking workshop with a lathe available to me :-) ).
Any thoughts? Am I right in supposing that the cogwheel shouldn't look
as if it had a slot round the middle?
/Jonas
On 2011-04-13 19:00, cctech-request at classiccmp.org wrote:
>> On 06/04/2011 19:04, Tony Duell wrote:
> In case anyone's wondering why I've been silent for almost a week, it was
> due to problems with some modern equipment between me and this list. That
> is to say my ISP had routing problems (or so it appears). The ancient
> parts (my PC) worked perfectly.
Something like what my ISP did to me a while ago. The web/mail/database
server they provided decided to self-destruct, taking down among other
things, email for the whole family. It took them about a week to find
out that the server was beyond repair, and transfer all accounts to a
new machine - of course they changed its name at the same time. I asked
them to restore all mail from the old one, goodness knows what would
have happened to it otherwise. It turned out that "restoring" mail meant
dumping a gazillion files with strange names in some directory structure
specific to the old mail system. The databases ended up as SQL scripts.
Of course I changed providers, and had to spend a couple of weeks
downloading the mail files, importing them into Thunderbird and moving
them to the new server. Thankfully all the files were RFC-822 format,
but I still had to rename them all. Thank goodness for bulk renaming
utilities. I didn't want to rename them in place in case I messed up so
I had to do it all in Windows. All this work I would still have had to
do if I had stayed with the old provider, of course. Obviously, paying a
provider to manage a server and do backups etc doesn't necessarily mean
they do it very well.
/Jonas
Hi all,
I'm currently enjoying to read Prosser and Winkels Book "the art of
digital design". Currently I'm right into the last sections. Every now
and then theres a "laboratory manual" referenced which should contain
more technical stuff about the 2 designs (one is more or less pure ttl
and the other is a microcoded design).
It would be very interesting to look into this laboratory manuals (I
can look up the correct name of the document, don't have the book
handy at the moment) as the book itself only contains the basic design
ideas and stuff. I'd greatly appreciate any hint where to get this
manuals in print or pdf.
Regards,
Wolfgang
--
Wolfgang Eichberger - OE5EWL
Operating System Collector
Blog: 5ewl.blogspot.com
Homepage: www.eichberger.org
On Thursday, April 14, 2011 at 23:33, I wrote:
> My only concern is that the description shown is "Duplexer cover -
> Covers the duplexer on the back of the printer" ...but this printer has
> no duplexer (it's an option). The cover I need actually covers the
> end of the paper tray.
Aha! I see from the "Advanced" view on the PartSurfer page that the part
description is different; there, it's "Cover, tray 2," and that is indeed
what it covers.
Thanks again, Steve.
-- Dave
Hi folks,
I just acquired an old HP 4100N laser printer that is missing the rear
dust cover. A drawing of the missing cover from the user manual is here:
http://home.earthlink.net/~jdbryan/dropbox/hp4100-cover.png
This cover attaches at the bottom of the rear of the machine and covers the
back end of paper tray #2 and the fuser assembly. It's present if the
printer does not have the duplexing attachment.
Could someone who has one of these printers please let me know the part
number that's molded into the inside of the cover, so that I may locate a
replacement? The cover number probably will be of the form "RBn-nnnn".
Beware that there will also be part numbers present for the plastic resin
used in making the cover (e.g., "Cycoloy C6600-GY8070" or "HP Material PN
4093-2825"), at least based on the other covers on the machine.
Thanks!
-- Dave
Hi Sergio! That?s excellent! Very nice!
Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
_____
From: n8vem at googlegroups.com [mailto:n8vem at googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of
Sergio Gimenez
Sent: Thursday, April 14, 2011 4:14 PM
To: n8vem at googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [N8VEM: 9468] Re: Jupiter Ace
A batch of 5 Jupiter Ace pcb?s arrived today (5 jupiter & 5 keyboards
pcb?s)!
Who wants a pcb ? Each one pcb is 20 $ + shipping costs (shiping costs to
EEUU is 10 $ , to Europe is 5 Euros )
To EEUU = 50 $
To Europe = 45 $ or 37 Euros.
You can make payment by Paypal to computronik at telefonica.net
Best regards.
Sergio.
Hi! The S-100 Serial IO PCBs have arrived! These are updated respins of
the S-100 Serial IO board from last summer with minor corrections and
improvements.
The S-100 Serial IO board is a dual serial board (Z85C30 UART) and includes
provisions for the V-Stamp Voice Synthesizer, a DLR USB245R USB adapter, and
parallel port.
http://s100computers.com/My%20System%20Pages/Serial%20IO%20Board/Serial%20IO
%20Board.htm
The board is $20 plus $3 shipping in the US and $6 elsewhere. Please send a
PayPal to LYNCHAJ at YAHOO.COM and I will send your boards right away!
There are plenty of PCBs so even if you weren't on the waiting list there
should be plenty to go around. Thanks and have a nice day!
Andrew Lynch
http://cgi.ebay.com/HUGE-Vintage-Computer-Collection-and-MORE-/360358787375…
o man, what a hot heap of vintij stuph! (sorry I couldn't resist. It's been a while at least).
that ADAM alone has got to be worth 1 - 1.5 week's pay! And that COCO. Whew.
I'm tempted. That's about as much as I have in savings. But rent is due later in the week *sigh*
