Nifty Find - HP2644A

I picked up on a $10.00 eBay Buy it now an HP2644A terminal. This terminal uses little tapes (DC-100A's or HP 98200A's). It's slightly beat up (mostly in shipping in spite of the seller's best and professional efforts), but nothing (except see below) that I can't repair - I'm pretty sure I can get this back to nearly original factory condition. It should be a nice complement to some classic micro's I'm working with. The HP 2644A is working. It even came with the hard to replace RS-232 cable,with an edge connector to the unit, weird. Annoying, considering that this thing cost several $1000's in the mid 1970's. It looks like you could put 20 amps of RS-232 signal through it, given the diameter of the cable! The 2644A's claim to fame is that it used the 8008 CPU, and has a tiny mini-operating system, pretty good for a machine with 16K of address space. There is a web site in Germany with a pong game that is actually that you run on the 8008 in the terminal via a diagnostic "back door", which I'm looking forward to trying. I wonder who wrote it. This unit I have doesn't have many goodies like graphics or lower case, but for $10, what do you want. It's built like a "mainframe", and later models used the same everything with different boards plugged into the backplane. I got a few manuals with it; the 2645A and 2648A manuals. The 2645 seems to be very similar. A few questions: 1. The "infamous" HP 98200A tapes are REALLY awful. I got a box on eBay, never used, in wrappers, and they failed immediately. After taking them apart, I think I know why. Even sealed after all these years, the oxide was actualy coming off the tape and the reels didn't even have clips to hold the tape on. Whatever held the ends of the tape on originally, doesn't. Hard to beleive that this was an HP product of that era. I've got almost 35 year old audio casettes that still work and sound great. I think DC100A's and even DC2000's will work according to what I've googled. Any comments? Of course, I've already tackled and (probably) fixed the "gummy" roller problem. Before I used the drives, even. Naturally, I've given away all of my DC2000 tapes... 2. Has anyone ever seen a CRT develop mold between the (bonded to the tube) safety glass and the tube itself? The unit itself was probably stored indoors in a controlled environment because it was otherwise very clean. I'm pretty sure I can get a replacement, but it will cost. Too bad, because the tube is really good and not burned in whatsoever, which is very surprising (the tape heads have zero detectable wear also). Trust me, even if it's technically possible, I won't be trying to separate the safety glass from the tube itself. I hate replacing CRT's. Unfortunately, I've gotten good at it. 3. The tab key is missing. Not broken off, just missing. I have a "kinda close" replacement, but if anyone has a junk HP product of that era with tall, "Cherry" keytops, I'll take anything. Thanks for reading! __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! News - Today's headlines http://news.yahoo.com