17 Jun
1998
17 Jun
'98
11:34 a.m.
Agreed. You can understand an ASR33 or similar by
turning it by hand and
tripping linkages, etc. I did it years ago. Doing the same to a video
terminal, even a simple dumb terminal, is a lot harder (Done that as well!)
I have actually done that with a chunk of one of these computers - the
turn of one gear would cause a hundred others to move.
The other nice thing is that, with the possible
exception of custom cams,
it's generally pretty obvious what broken parts should be like. And then
it's possible to make them without too much equipment. But a dead custom
chip is almost impossible to figure out, and hard to reproduce.
That is very true - a stripped gear is a stripped gear is a stripped gear!
Fixing one of these mechanical computers, however, is completely different
from the familiar digital ones. In the latter, all
problems (except video)
are go/no go. In the former, problems manifest themselves in
the outputs
giving out-of-spec or erroneous results (except with a catasprophic
failure!).
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net