25 Aug
2012
25 Aug
'12
2:04 p.m.
My favourite
CP/M box is, I think, the Epson QX10. Interesting hardware
at least. A 7220 for graphics, those lovely voice-coil floppy drives, etc.
I have a QX-10 on the desk here beside me; it really is a lovely machine
(despite the plastic case; somehow I always think that 'real' computers should have metal cases). And yes, those drives are
great (although I had
to clean/strip the eject mechanisms on mine; I suspect they're prone to
I stripped mine when I first got the machine, cleaned everything and id a
full alignment. Be warned that strippign the positioner is not recomended
-- aligning it is 'fun'. And strippign the spinde motor is certainly not
recomented -- therte's a tacho coil in the cover with thin wires goign
down to the PCB. They're covered in quange, so you don't notice them
until you've ripped them off. I had to remove the coil, unwind a ocuple
of turns and put it back (fortunately the inner end of the widing was
still long enough to sodler to, so I didn't have to unwind the whole coil).
My diagrams for the TF20 -- I think they're on one of the old computer
sites -- include rather more scehamtics for this drive than the Epson
manual...
sticking with age). I'm still looking for an
Epson dot-matrix printer of
some flavor to complete mine (and some add-on cards would be nice)
I think oyu must be the only person here _not_ to have an Epson dot
matrix printer :-). Theyr are easy to find. Finding HPIB and HPIL
interfacea for them (either is needed for the QX10, of course, but they
do both exist) is rather harder.
Did you do anything to modify the airflow on yours? I think I read
somewhere that they were prone to filling up with dust due to the lack of
filter and fan direction.
No, I don;'t run it enough for that to be a problem. I open it up and
clean it from time to time anyway.
Does a non-CP/M box count? The Tatung Einstein?
It runs soemthing called
XtalDOS which is very CP/M-like (I think most of the calls are the same).
I think that was true of Torch CP/N too, wasn't it? Which makes me wonder
how common "almost CP/M" variants were...