Excercising vintage items - was: Commodore 8010 IEEE-488 Acoustic Modem ?

On Wed, Oct 20, 2004 at 09:30:28PM -0400, Dave Dunfield wrote: Understandable. If you really need a serial port, there are faster items out there... but AFAIK, at the moment, that's the fastest you have... I'm in the use, fix-as-necessary, and don't worry about powering up equipment I expect to be good (reforming ancient caps is a different problem). If I can't fix it, I probably shouldn't own it. Very much agreed... might as well only do emulation. Sure. I even have a couple of devices that are handy for that - Telephone C.O. simulators... I have one that I used to make and sell - the ComBox(R) (really... (R)... no :-) It's more than 10 years old, so it's even on-topic even when not used to hook up classic gear. It's an i8049-based box with two RJ11s, lights and buttons. By dialling different numbers, you can simulate a regular call, PBX-outgoing, half- connections, missing ring, etc. It was really handy when I was writing autodialer software for our VAXBI HASP product (V.24?) You would literally take an analog phone, plug it in, then cradle the handset in your acoustic couple - plug a hardware or acoustic coupler in the 'B' port, and feed the calling end a couple of digits to dial, and *bringggg* - a connection. I also have a 4-line model we picked up during product research to see what features were being pushed by the competition. I could literally have my own private phone network at home for classic machines that are strictly modem based. Mostly I play. Like you, I rotate through stuff, whatever is currently interesting to me. Before I left home to come down here for a year, I spent a bunch of time working on my PDP-8/e - all hardware diagnosis and repair (if I just wanted to run OS/8 programs, I'd either use simh or fire up my SBC6120, which I do often). At the moment, the -8/e now has a stable PSU (the breaker wouldn't stay latched - a mechanical, not electrical fault - it got smacked *hard* before I got it), and I was diagnosing some CPU fault that was so deep that the front panel didn't do a whole lot, no matter what you frobbed. I was about to pull out the board extenders, O-scope, and ancient HP logic analyzer when it was time to start packing. Over the last year, I have been shopping for parts; just this week I picked up an M8330 to replace my M833 (newer ECOed version of same board) for $9.99! (opening bid, no competition) I'm glad I did - I got scooped recently on a complete KK8E w/EAE. The ultimate reason for fiddling with all of this is to eventually fire up an RK8E I got several years ago in a swap, and use _that_ to eventually read an RK05F-16 pack I got in 1984. I have *no* idea what may be on it, and I'll love it when I can finally read it out. The other thing I do with vintage equipment is show-and-tell. Mostly at home with friends, but I have hauled an -8/L, w/rack, w/ASR-33 to a local convention for a computer exhibit (along with lots of C= equipment) Unfortunately, some bastard, most likely a hotel employee (or someone with a lockpick, since it was after hours from a padlocked room) walked off with my Dell P-133 laptop with about two weeks of recent Open Source work on it. The show was a success - losing two wireless cards and a fully tricked out Linux laptop was a real bite. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-130-S Current South Pole Weather at 21-Oct-2004 02:50 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -69.2 F (-56.3 C) Windchill -91.8 F (-68.8 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 4.3 kts Grid 100 Barometer 675.7 mb (10788. ft) Ethan.Dicks(a)amanda.spole.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html