At 01:45 AM 8/11/2008, Steven M Jones wrote: Well, the listing does not claim that it is working. It could be empty on the inside as far you can tell from the outside, or it might power-up the first time you try. Of the half-dozen I have in the office basement - erhmmm - computer museum, none power-up any longer. I've resisted the urge to board-swap, waiting for the moment when Tony clones himself to properly debug and repair all antique computers across the globe. - John

On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 09:13:08PM +0100, Tony Duell wrote: Agreed - when we used to get calls from customers about COMBOARDs, one of the first things we told them to do was to reset the board (most commonly in a BA-11 or BA-23, depending on the model). It fixed a large number of problems (well over 25%) and the customers were very happy to be running again without having to wait for a replacement board to be shipped. Given that in our case it was rarely bad hardware, I have to suspect something to do with tin-plated DEC backplane fingers and gold-plated peripheral card fingers. I've also had good results with pre-OMNIBUS PDP-8 gear by removing all the cards, then cleaning the backplane with a chunk of manila folder, cut to one 36-pin slot width, then dipped in >70% isopropyl alcohol and run up and down each slot (switch to a new section when you start to see grey streaks on the paper). That one trick has taken machines that wouldn't pass the simplest of toggle-in tests to passing most if not all paper-tape tests - no actual bad chips, just dirty backplane connections. Since the Terak in question uses LSI-11 boards, I'm guessing it uses a DEC-compatible QBus backplane. If not, then this technique may or may not be particularly useful. The H-11, in particular, does _not_ use DEC backplane modules, so I wouldn't expect it to have as much of an effect there, for example. -ethan -- Ethan Dicks, A-333-S Current South Pole Weather at 11-Aug-2008 at 20:20 Z South Pole Station PSC 468 Box 400 Temp -79.8 F (-62.1 C) Windchill -126.0 F (-87.8 C) APO AP 96598 Wind 16.7 kts Grid 12 Barometer 671.7 mb (10943 ft) Ethan.Dicks at usap.gov http://penguincentral.com/penguincentral.html

All this talk of Teraks reminds me, it's about time for my approximately semi-annual QBus framebuffer hunt. Is anyone keen to sell such a thing? Gordon

e.stiebler wrote: Well just to cover this reply and the couple of off-list emails I've had, I'm looking for *some sort* of framebuffer that I can fit to my PDP-11/73. Ideally it should be able to do a couple of greyscales (But 1-bit would be fine) or colour, and if it can spit out RS-170ish video that would be lovely. RGB I can probably do, *if* I can figure out where I put the rather nice little Japanese-spec 12" colour monitor I found... I've got loads of quad-height slots free. Now, I've been offered a VCB02 set, which I believe is from a MicroVAX. Will these work in a PDP11? Would I need to make any mods? Bear in mind that I'm most likely going to write the software from scratch. Gordon