What is this Vadic thing ?

YEs, and I'm probably too young/have the wrong qualifications/am over-educated to rewind motors, make HP9800 card reader rollers, repair TTL-based processors, align disk drives or do any of the other things I do routinely ;-) FWIW, I reparied my first TTL-based minicomputer (a Philips P850 when I was a first year undergraduate. Yo uare never too young to learn :-) I know it's easy to think that they stuff you enjoy is the stuff everyone should enjoy, and that it's totally wrong to assume that. But I really would urge anyone with a serious interest in how computers _really_ worked 30-40 years ago to get a TTL-based minicomputer (Philips P800, DEC PDP8/e or PDP8/a, etc, DEC PDP11 (one of the older Unibus ones, even an HP9800 desktop 'calculator') and spend amy days wit hthe scheamtics, the microcode listings and a logic analyser. Be warned it quickly becomes addictive 'Oh, I'll come to bed when I've understood just how this darn thing skips the next instruction/handles interrupts/...' -tony