From: "O. Sharp" <ohh at drizzle.com> Well: I finally took a leap of faith, and bought an ASR-33 from someone who wasn't anywhere near Seattle. After a previous (extremely bad) Teletype shipping experience (read: TTY dumped in box and packing peanuts poured on top; unit largely destroyed in transit; seller refused to refund and claimed damage was somehow _my_ fault; story actually got worse from there if you can believe that, but maybe that's enough for now), it took a leap of faith to try buying another one I couldn't personally pick up. But the seller took a _lot_ of extra care packing it, including bolting the typing unit to the chassis, and wonder of wonders it actually arrived completely intact. :) But in spite of that it needs some help, so I thought I'd ask a couple of questions here. -The one big problem it has is its lack of a reader power supply. The last owner got it from a government surplus program, but they neglected to supply anything but the unit itself... and so no reader supply. Does somebody have the schematic of one of these so I can build a new one? (Better yet: does somebody have a spare one I can talk them out of for a reasonable price?) -I'm looking at some DEC diagrams saying how the ASR-33 gets modified for use with a PDP-8 series interface (thanks once more to Mr. Kossow!). It says two "6RS205P484 Thyractors DEC #1100106" should be added to the unit. Okay, I admit it: I don't even know what the hell a "thyractor" _is_, much less what ratings I should be looking for re: these two. Can someone shed a little light on this? -Right now the unit is doing a lot of chattering on both Line and Local when powered on. Initially I thought something might be mechanically wrong due to being shaken around in shipping, say one of the clutches on the main shaft locking into an active position, but so far I haven't found a culprit. I'm also wondering if I'm even looking in the right direction for the problem, sooo here's the question: could the lack of a power supply for the reader be causing this behavior? (The reader itself is obviously inert right now, but I'm wondering if there's a missed connection or somesuch which could explain it.

...At some point I'll probably ask someone with a copyholder to take some tracings and measurements for me so I can fabricate a new one, but maybe I'll just see if I can get it working first. :) -O.-