Data General NOVA4 status

Well things are moving along very nicely, I'm going to power up in the next few days. I've been picking on it each night (30 min - 2 hrs) and it's pretty much ready to begin power-up. I took another look at the DG LP2 that "faulted". With a dry paintbrush and vacuum cleaned out the dustbunnies and a few spiders, esp. attention to the photo-interruptor. Loaded paper into it, powered up. This time carriage zeroing worked, everything behaved including self-test printing out the charset onto greenbar. The "new" ribbons seem dried out and the print is yellow-gray (likely from Bakersfield heat) but I'll try another or WD40 the ink ribbon. Washed it all down, other than a couple of scuffs it looks like new. Completed all the rack wiring, made a terminal (console) cable up panel fillers all in. Took a look at the other chassis; one now empty (DG salesmammals talked customer into too many (profitable) racks, as Bruce suspected :-) one's got the big analog mux thing (more, next message), the remaining has the second tape drive (6023) and the 4300 expansion chassis. Which I might keep -- ask me in a month -- it contains a 16 in/16 out digital interface and I think a one-channel A/D and D/A. Nice. Big though, we're talking 14" rack space but it's mostly air (lots of slots). Laid out all the docs, culled more dupes, which Bruce will get (hi Bruce :-) Bought binders on the way into work today for never-used docs. My lab, quickly outfit last fall (moved out of my nice, purpose-built lab, which we turned into a rent-generating apartment -- when I get sad, I think of the income :-) has crappy power. I'm not sure it's got enough amps to run the CPU, tape and disk. Umm, we'll see, the obvious way.