help - 11/34 console problem -- CNTRL key behaviour - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

10 Nov 2005

Allison wrote: 

...
  Never seen a dead 8008.  I thought I'd killed one
(at $180 then!)
 by installing it backward and then tossed it on the floor in the
 engineering lab. some days later after pulling from the bottom
 of my shoe I tried it again and it was still alive. 
Amazing, but I will not try to repeat it to test your story :-)

...
  The ram however is definately suspect. But I've
seen IO 
 messups with 8008 and with scanned displays and keyboards are 
 harder to look at. 
This weekend I will check the RAMs!

...
  It would be goof if you could run a different program
and see 
 it's results.
 We used a set of ROMs all different to test.  They were short 
 programs that would either loop or do something and halt. For 
 example we had one that would write (this was a time display) 
 00:00:00 then increment all the displays without doing 
 anything else.  Another would write a 8 tot he last display 
 and halt.  the most useful ones were those that would 
 repeatedly loop input or output to a port.  Very handy as 
 back (1973) then logic analysers were not to be had and a 
 15mhz dual trace scope was the usual tool. 
I checked the contents of the ROMs (from the listing). They are
quite filled, there is no room to show a clock on the display.
Would be fun, because once the 11/34 runs, the display is not
very exciting any more ...
Pity that the ROMs are soldered on the board. It would be quite
a hack (but certainly possible!) to enable an other set of ROMs
to run e.g. the clock software. But then there is also the
difficulty to get the proper (blank) ROMs.
But it is a fun idea to keep in mind ...

The RAM timing traces will be up on Monday!

  thanks,
- Henk, PA8PDP.

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