27 Oct
2011
27 Oct
'11
12:49 p.m.
I am wondering
why you bought said old terminals if you had
no use for them.
I always loved to tinker. I guess I wasn't imaginative enough at the
time to do anymore w/them then what I did (dismantle them, gawk at the
insides). I'm not sure what my intentions were, I guess I just saw more
computering stuff, and they were cheap, so I said what the hay.
It is funny though how little information is (was?) commonly
available back then. I think my parents bought my Tandy 2000 a few years
I am not convinved it's much better now. OK, we do have the web now, and
there are some useful wrb sites, but the number of useful books has
certainly decreased. I can remember when there was a bookshop in London
that sold IC databooks (and the ARRL publications, and...). It's no more.
The booksshps that remain sell a few introductory books, and the course
texts for the universisties (many of which are not that useful) and
little else. There's nothing to compare with some of the older books that
are (sometimes [1]) on my bookshelves.
[1] The rest of the time I am reading them, of coruse.
And there are plenty of things that I've wanted to find information on
where hunting round the web (Google searches, checking fora/mailing
lists, etc) ahs found nothing useful (or nothing at all).
earlier, and until I took a 2nd job and earned enough
to buy an NEC
Multisync II (about 600$ back then, earned that standing guard over
Christmas trees for 3 weeks, in not exactly the best of neighborhoods),
? I played
around w/surplus monitors to see if I could get a picture w/the
T2K's something less then standard video. And in
reality it was all that
There are many video 'standards'. To misquote Brian Kernighan, every
machine shpuld have one of its own :-)
unstandard. Well, I obtained a gorgeous actual
15" open frame ttl green
monitor (Panasonic IIRC), intended for what I don't know, from a place
in Massachusetts. What little it would have taken to get it to work, but
since I knew next to nothing about electronics and whatnot, I didn't
have the guts to tinker too much. Something might explode/implode I must
have thought! I asked my goofy Fortran professor, and he rubbed his chin
and did everything but give me an answer.
You;'d prbalby have got more useful infromation talking to a freindly and
knowledgeable TV service guy :-)
You could wander many community colleges to this day and still not get
an answer. I probably also read something in Byte or somewhere about
altering the trimpots inside a monitor and endangering some part of your
body as a result.
Very umliley. I suppsose if the modification/tweaks caused the EHT to
signifciantly rise, you'd get Xrays which can have an adverse effect on
you, but it's not easy to get the EHT to rise by tweaking trimpots. In
any case, you check the EHT with a voltmeter (don't you? :-))
-tony