5 Oct
2007
5 Oct
'07
7:04 p.m.
And thusly were the wise words spake by Liam Proven
But the schematics can help you fix a problem.. Even if you are only
following the connections, it may help to show you which component
failed by what the problem is and what is still working.
On 05/10/2007, Bryan Pope <bpope at wordstock.com> wrote:
Errgh.. I was *not* talking about anything modern!! :( :( Is not
this a *vintage* computer email group?! I was referring to things
like C= PETs, 4040s and other systems from that era! ie stuff you
can test with equipment that does not mortgage your house..
And thusly were the wise words spake by Liam
Proven
Er, hardly, when a modern chip has several tens of millions of gates on it!
I make my meagre crust working on machines of, on average, 2-3GHz of
processing power, 1-2 gig of RAM and about a quarter to a half a
terabyte of RAM. I fear when one of those goes wrong, probing for a
duff transistor will do me little good!
Fascinating. The snag is, I know very little about electronics below
the level of a broad knowledge of TTL, the rudiments of circuits and
gates and so on. I have a bit of theory, no practice. I could not
diagnose a faulty chip or anything; my troubleshooting consists of
All you need to start with is a logic probe. Then for simple logic
chips like AND, OR, NOT you would place the logic probe on the one
or two inputs o see if they are high or low. Then from that you
would know what the output should be. For chips that were a little
more complex you would use the truth table from the datasheet for
the particular chip to see what the output should be for each
combination of input(s). I know for the
Amiga Commodore provided schematics...
I know a few dozen characters of Chinese. I also know that I could buy
a Chinese dictionary, but it wouldn't tell me anything! :?) Ahhh. I'm going the other way. The recent new
skills that are relevant
to me are principles of firewalling and TCP/IP security, routing, DNS
setup and so on. I'm also trying to learn about setting up and running
Linux servers built from scratch and a bit of coding in Python. For
me, the relevance of basic electronics is declining, not increasing,
and I am already half way through my life and accelerating!
So now you will be able to write a TCP/IP stack for a vintage computer? ;)
How computers work is pretty much the same since the beginning.. they
have just got faster over time. (and a lot more sterile, IMHO)
Cheers,
Bryan