20 Feb
2008
20 Feb
'08
11:15 p.m.
Tony Duell Wrote:
Ah, I'm not in the office, so I can't flame the originator of that
comment... As I don't have the e-mail on my laptop here ;)
Still, to answer the question, I DO know the first thing about electronics -
it's the 2nd and 3rd things that I'm not so sure about.... Or, to put it
another way, I can do *basic* stuff, but I've not got the skills to do a
logic analysis, for example. In other words, I'd be reliant on chip-swapping
(and socket-swapping, assuming I had some compatible sockets, which I
don't).
Well...
clearly the seller is not an electronics expert, but if you
want to buy a 30-year-old computer of any variety and you don't know
the first thing about electronics, you'd better have a friend who does.
When I make comments like that I get flamed alive. Oh well... More seriously, if you want to run a real vintage
computer (as opposed to
running emulators on modern hardware), then you have to rememebr that
you're running possibly 30 year old electronics. It's going to fail
sometime. It's going to need repair. So either you have to learn to do it
yourself (which is often not tht difficult, although sometimes you can
spend a long time trakcing doewn an oscure fault, or making a replacement
part, or...) Or you have to find (and be prepared to pay) a friend to do
the repair. And there aren't that many people who do classic computer
repairs.
That's not a bad philosophy. I guess I've been lucky so far; the few
machines I have in my possession have been relatively healthy - the only
machine that's flaked out on me while in storage is an old Osborne luggable.
Oh, and I fried one of my QLs, but that was my own silly fault (switched the
monitor on after the QL = blown 8032)
Cheers,
Ade.