On 03/10/2007, Tony Duell <ard at p850ug1.demon.co.uk> wrote:
On 03/10/2007, Rod Smallwood <RodSmallwood at mail.ediconsulting.co.uk> wrot=
e:
If you are in the UK then Black Box stock MMJ
cables.
Setting aside the notion of /buying/ new parts to build a cable, which
is dangerously close to crazy talk around here...
I think we need to keep in mind the purchase price of the machine,
here, folks. I'm not going to spend =A320 or =A330 on getting or making a
cable for a 99p computer!
Ah, you've clearly not come across one of 'ARDs laws of vintage
computing', namely that the machines are cheap, but you'll go broke
buying disks, cables, plugs, repair components, and so on.
No, but it sounds horribly plausible... [Looks alarmed]
The way to thin of it is not 'I had to spend 20
times as much for the
cable as for the CPU' but 'I've got a nice little machine for \pounds
21.00'. :-)
[Grin]
Also, I do not
have any of the tools or parts to crimp anything onto
anything. I never have had and have never crimped a cable in 20y in
the computer business, from junior workshop bod to IT manager for an
international stockbroker.
Next you'll be telling me you've never used a soldering iron, 'scope,
logic analyser or machine code monitor either...
I own a soldering iron and sometimes manage to use it without burning
myself too badly. I recently bought my first multimeter, as it was
very cheap in Lidl and I thought it might come in handy some time,
though I confess I don't know when, exactly. It's still in its box.
'Scope? Oscilloscope? No, never. Logic analyser? I only have a hazy
idea what one is. Not sure I've ever seen one. M/C monitor? Not since
the 1980s, and then only to do things like kick off a low-level
format, or reboot a machine fairly cleanly, or try to restart a
crashed program. Never in anger, but then, I never learned to code in
assembly. BASIC is my forte; I am currently half-heartedly trying to
learn Python.
Nope, in two decades of professional computer fettling, from minis to
mainframes to workstations to PDAs to smartphones, and of course PC
servers, laptops, desktops and many Macs, I've never soldered a chip
or a PCB, never done anything more than remove & replace a socketed
chip. I've built more machines than I can remember, fixed innumerable
broken ones, restored old dead ones and given them away or sold them,
but generally, to me, the smallest unit of a computer is a circuit
board, and when one is dead, it gets thrown away and replaced.
--
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