17 Jan
2005
17 Jan
'05
9:41 a.m.
b) There is no
useful signal from the side-1 head (this is the head on
the top surface of the disk, of course),
For all the possibilities you state, likely cause. Well, although _now_ I have some very nice test
gear, I debugged my first
homebrew computer (This was when homebrewing meant soldering chips to
stripboard and wiring everything up, not pluging a video card into a
motherboard) with an anlaogue multimeter and an LED+resitor 'logic
probe'. So it certainly _can_ be done...
Likewise! On my very first own computer, SWTPC 6800, I debugged
the fact I miswired the (20mA loop) tty using a Tek 555 scope to ID the Mikbug code loop waiting for the start bit. I
was too dumb
to realize I should have checked for Rx into the PIA :-)
Soldered every damn chip and all those molex "card edge"
connectors one at a time. Ugh. Plus a whole tube of 2102's (and
not 21L02's) a year later.
Now I buy only laptops, nearly impossible to even open them, and
Yuck! I'd not want a computer I couldn't easily pull apart, and I'd not
want one without proper expansion (not Useless Serial Botch). Heck, I've
even played about with the processor bus in HP handheld calculators...
quite happy with that. :-) Even having to stick in a
PCMCIA card
these days seems invasive. Why isn't that built in?
The stuff I want is rarely built in, because no sane person would want it...
-tony