4 Feb
2007
4 Feb
'07
4:40 p.m.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
On 2/4/07, Pete Turnbull <pete at
dunnington.plus.com> wrote:
Actually they were cheap to repair, because the most common failure by
smoke emission was the 74LS125 and the next most common was the MC3740
(I hope I've remembered that number correctly). The former cost a few
tens of pennies and the latter several tens of pennies. It was just a
nuisance to have to do it, especially since at one time the Motorola
chip was hard to source in small quantities. One Motorola distributor
even told me it didn't exist!
Neither did I, for much the same reasons. And I
had to repair quite a
few that went out of alignment, and some that had released the magic
smoke when someone plugged the drives in "off by one" after they
disconnected them to move the machine.
That was a problem I also saw with the drives. Several of my friends
had Apple IIs (I had a 32K PET 2001-N), and ISTR more than one person
did that. Not cheap. My memory is that at the time, the bare drives
were $600 new, so even if one just replaces boards, it's not
inexpensive in that environment. The 6520 == 6821 FWIW.
Not quite -- they're functionally equivalent but the 6520 is a copy of
the 6820, and the 6821 is a later more reliable part. We regularly
replaced the ones in PETs because one (I forget which of the two it had)
used to get damaged easily.
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Network Manager
University of York