MODCOMP II Rescue Revisited...

Hi Well done that guy!! What you have done is both the spirit and the essence of classic computing. You are to be congratulated on both effort and persistence. "A shining light to lead others into the darkness of old computer restoration" I was at DEC (UK) in the 70's and Modcomp would pop up as competition Hasn't that front panel got DEC overtones? Is there a keyboard terminal or screen with it? Rod Smallwood DecCollector -----Original Message----- From: cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctech-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of Lyle Bickley Sent: 05 June 2007 05:07 To: General Discussion: On-Topic Posts Only Subject: MODCOMP II Rescue Revisited... A number of you probably remember me "announcing" in Jan, 2007 that I had rescued a MODCOMP II/12 from a lab here in Silicon Valley. The link for that is below (sorry, it's slow - the pictures are large). http://bickleywest.com/modcomp.htm After a lot of work cleaning up both the CPU and I/O chassis I began checking out the system. It turned out that the I/O chassis was in pretty bad shape. I went back to the lab facility where I found the MODCOMP II - looked through several more buildings - and found another lone MODCOMP II I/O chassis. I went through the "salvage" process again - and finally picked it up about a month ago. It was in a lot better shape than the original I/O unit. And the really great news - it was an identical configuration to my original I/O chassis. After cleaning it up, doing all the usual capacitor, power supply checking - I powered it up - and everything "looked" good - and no bad "cooking" smells ;-) I cabled up the CPU and I/O unit, powered 'em up - and to my amazement the front panel controls seemed to work O.K. I then did the usual hand memory tests - and core memory worked O.K. every location I tested. I then wrote a bunch of small diagnostics (in machine code) - and found that I/O was not easy to code - but I did enough to check that the console in/out ports worked O.K. Today I loaded diagnostic monitors, and diags - and most of the system - including I/O is working! The really good news is that all 64K (words) of core memory passed the long manufacturing memory diagnostic - which even tests for "hot cores" failing. It's been months in the making this critter come alive - but it sure feels great when the diagnostics tell you that you are on the right track :-) Cheers, Lyle -- Lyle Bickley Bickley Consulting West Inc. Mountain View, CA http://bickleywest.com "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"