31 May
2013
31 May
'13
12:47 p.m.
I just like fiddling at the card (as well as
component) level, I think; it
takes a bit of the fun out of it when everything's integrated onto one (or
two) PCBs.
I certainly like an expansion bus, and, in fact, one of the things I
dsilike about anything remotely recent is that either there's no
expanison bos or if there is it's very difficult to interface to. So,
yes, I do like I/O slots. But after that, since I never realy work at the
board level, I don't much care whether there's a large motherboard with
a few expansion slots on it (like the QX10) or a passive backpale nwit
hte CPU, memroy, etc, boards plugged in (like an S100 system).
[Epson disk drives]
Well, I did mean spare complete units - of course if one failed on me I'd
Why on earth would you even think of repalcing a compelte drive?
do what I could to repair it, but like you say there
are a couple of ASICs
on there, and the heads aren't bomb-proof (I remember a bad Wabash disk
tearing the head in one of my 380Z systems right off its mounting once)
Ouch!. Wabash disks were pretty awful, but I never had one actually
damage a drive. When I was at school, at first you had to use floppy
disks bought fro mthe school and they were Wabash :-(. Ouch!. In the end
they let us use disks from elsewhere (like the assortment of Inmac Pluss,
Berbatim, Dysan, etc that I had...) but they were totally clueless,
saying things like 'If you use single sided disks, do not attempt to
format the other side (remember the 380Z treats a double sided drive as 2
separate single-sided ones), you cna damage the drive heads. Nothing
woudl convince them that both heads touched the disk no batter which side
was being used.
I don't know if I was particularly unlucky, but I never had a single
clueful maths, physics (or computing) teacher. I hope some other schools
were better...
-tony