New subject: Common items you passed up that turned rare when you wanted them

31 Jan 2006

...
 From: "Richard" <legalize at
xmission.com>

In article <43DFACB5.4000904 at bluewin.ch>,
    Jos Dreesen / Marian Capel <jos.mar at bluewin.ch>  writes:

   Ooh!  A
Lilith.  I lucked out and have 4 main units, but I need docs,
 and information on hooking up keyboards, mice and monitors.  I think
 the monitors are special for the Lilith.  What did you get besides the
 main unit?  

 Richard,

 yours are Eves, the followup on the Lilith. 
Yes, I should have been more specific, my mistake :-).  At least a
couple of them are Eves, I am not 100% certain that all of them are
Eves because I didn't do a board inventory on all the units.  I have
about 10-15 spare boards besides the 4 main units that I have, so if
someone needs one for a board swap (shhhhhh don't tell Tony Duell :-)
drop me an email.

  Keyboard, mice and monitors are indeed special to
the Lilith.

 The keyboard has a serial, straight ASCII output and goes to the 
 monitor. In the monitor is a serial to parallel convertor and the 
 keyboard data then goes in parallel to the main unit ! 
Holy shit, that's crazy!  I thought it was a straight serial ASCII
into the box.  Well that puts the bamboozle on my idea of just hooking
up a keyboard to it straight!  I do have one monitor.  I haven't tried
to power it up, but written on the case is the word "DIM", presumably
identifying a failure in the monitor somewhere.  I've never repaired
monitors, so I'm not sure what a dim image is suppose to indicate.
Failing HV drive circuitry? 
Hi
 HV would cause blooming of the image. Dim image is weak cathode
in the tube or problems in the circuits controlling the cathode
to gate voltage levels.
Dwight

...

  The mouse is a 3 key straight quadrature output
thingie. 
Do you have any ideas on what kind of commercially available mice
would be compatible?

  The (external) floppy is very particular: it has
an Apple II floppy 
 controller card, a small 6502 motherboard in which the apple floppy unit 
 plugs and a serial connection . 
Umm... mine don't have floppy drives :-).  It looks like they have
been fitted with SCSI interfaces, SCSI hard drives and Bernoulli Box
removable cartridge drives.

  The backplane has a 200 contact connector, the
force required to insert 
 PCB is incredible. 
Yeah, I notice that when looking in the unit I have that is missing
its power supply.

  My Lilih is once again playing up, I will have to
bite the bullet and 
 draw the schematics. Cheap IC sockets might play a role, but 
 substituting a few hundred of them is also a PITA. 
Woo hoo!  Docs would be great as these machines came to me with no
information, but plenty of hardware.  I also have several complete
sets of video, etc., cabling, so if someone needs cables give me a
hollar.
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